PRESS STATEMENT OF SEN. PANFILO M. LACSON

Don't look for me. Look at the evidence. It's right under your nose. It won't cost you two centavos to fulfill your duty to provide justice to all concerned.

I will only come out when justice is rightly served, or when I'm already dead. It may not be the best way to spend geezerhood, but unless you get me ahead of my time, I prefer to suffer in pain but with dignity, sitting alone with my conscience for the rest of my life, rather than do time in jail for a crime I did not commit.

The facts are too glaring to ignore. For example, in 2009, my lone accuser, Cezar Mancao II, after freely admitting to having been pressured and promised a good life by the previous regime, applied to become a state witness and be dropped as a principal accused by testifying that "sometime in September, or early part of October 2000, when ex-President Estrada was out of the country, he overheard me order a murder to be committed."

Never mind that unassailable documents say that I was out of the country during that time, hence the physical impossibility of having engaged in that supposed "car conversation."

Last November 11, 2010, to appear to be the least guilty and qualify as a state witness, he manifested before the same court through his lawyer that "he only learned of the sordid affair 'ex post facto' or after the fact."

He "knew" but he didn't know.

Should I take his place in jail?

As lawyers like Sec. de Lima would always say, "untrue in one thing, untrue in everything."

My only appeal is for the honorable Secretary of Justice to exercise what she said is her "plenary power" to ask the court to withdraw the information and conduct a reinvestigation.