High court swallowed clearly false evidence
In his column (“Judicial process a circus,” Metro, 10/22/15), Ramon Tulfo wrote for the umpteenth time about a quadriplegic (one who has totally lost sensation in and control of both his arms and legs) who was convicted of rape by a regional trial court and sentenced to life in jail! If you think that decision by one RTC judge dropped jaws, wait till you try to process how Court of Appeals justices affirmed that decision in its entirety! Tulfo’s point was to show how screwed up our judges and justices can sometimes be.
As loony as it may seem, we, laypeople, don’t know whether we should laugh or cry over our judicial system! Luckily for that guy, he had Tulfo on his side tirelessly repeating a million times in the media an appeal to common sense! Tulfo finally got the chief executive to exercise a prerogative to correct iniquities committed by a callous judiciary. He informed us that guy was granted pardon during the watch of former president Gloria Arroyo (Metro, 10/6/15), thereby consigning that crazy judgment to oblivion.
We do not have the voice of any reputable columnist on our side who commands public attention. All we have is this little space in the Letters section to continue crying for justice against a patently unjust decision that sentenced our cousin, Christopher Soliva, to life imprisonment for a crime he did not commit (G.R. No. 196735, 5/5/14). All the lawyers, law professors and retired judges we have talked to were one in concluding that, given the undisputed facts, no one should be convicted on the SOLE TESTIMONY OF A FLIP-FLOPPING WITNESS who said one thing just minutes after the incident (that he did not know who attacked him) and then said another days later and after “consulting” his lawyer (that he knew who attacked him)! Was not that kind of evidence by itself blatantly false, or at the very least “doubtful”? How, in God’s name, did the Supreme Court see that as “proof of guilt beyond reasonable doubt”?
—MARGIE MEGAN LIBRANDO, [email protected]
