Detained Sen. Leila de Lima has asked a Muntinlupa judge to voluntarily inhibit herself in hearing a drug case pending before her court.

In a motion filed on March 25, De Lima has requested Presiding Judge Liezel Aquiatan of the Muntinlupa Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 205 to inhibit in case 17-165 “due to clear doubts as to her impartiality, fairness, moral courage, and integrity.”

Last month, Aquiatan denied the senator’s demurrer to evidence, a motion seeking to dismiss the case, which accuses her and Ronnie Dayan of conspiracy to commit illegal drug trading when she was still the justice secretary.

The two are accused of getting P10 million from New Bilibid Prison (NBP) inmates in November and December 2012.

“Taking into consideration the pieces of evidence of the prosecution collectively perused and analyzed, the Court is convinced that the evidence of guilt is strong,” Aquiatan ruled in her decision dated Feb. 17 but granted De Lima’s demurrer in another case, 17-166, which dismissed the charges against her.

De Lima filed a motion for reconsideration in case 17-165, saying, “Sampling Bias, cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of data that may contradict that position.”

Her appeal added that the court’s decision “created an unfair impression that the witnesses all testified to a seamless and wholly credible narration of accused De Lima’s guilt when, in fact, the prosecution’s own witnesses undermined the prosecution’s own case.”

Last March 5, Aquiatan denied De Lima’s appeal and ruled that “the court stands with its Omnibus Order that accused De Lima and Dayan must present their evidence to prove their innocence of the crime charged.”

In her motion for voluntary inhibition, De Lima claimed that “to be candid, the errors of both fact and law committed by the Honorable Presiding Judge may be considered as gross ignorance of the law.”

“The gravity of the errors in the Honorable Presiding Judge’s Omnibus Order, therefore, only points to either one of two possible conclusions: either she is truly grossly ignorant of the law despite her education and experience or she deliberately went against established principles because she is biased against Senator De Lima and she is acting pursuant to other motivations apart from upholding the rule of law and her mandate to properly dispense justice,” the motion stated.

“Why did the Honorable Presiding Judge fail to consider the entire evidence in this case? What prevented the Honorable Presiding Judge from doing so? Perhaps the Honorable Presiding Judge is truly biased against Senator De Lima? Maybe she is afraid for her own safety and that of her family? She may perhaps also have other motivations? What is clear is she has deliberately omitted glaring pieces of evidence, cherry-picked those that seem to support the theory of the prosecution, and even added her own impressions and conjectures even though they are not supported by the records of the case,” according to the motion.

It added, “Based on the overall foregoing circumstances, accused De Lima respectfully submits that she has lost faith on the impartiality of the Honorable Presiding Judge to render justice in this case. She is constrained to file this motion invoking her right to a fair trial before an impartial judge. She has already been unjustly incarcerated for 4 years, only for her to be further burdened by the Honorable Presiding Judge by imposing upon her an unjustified, unfounded, and imagined imperative to prove matters that are even outside of the scope of the information she is being charged with.”