The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of disputes. Given that role, it employs researchers and all kinds of high-caliber support staff to go through the drafts of its decisions with a fine-tooth comb, to ensure that they are free from errors in the statement of facts and applicable jurisprudence. But in the case of People vs Feliciano (“SC upholds murder conviction of 5 UP fratmen,” Metro, 6/8/14), it got its facts messed up! An innocent man, Christopher Soliva, is now rotting in jail on account of that!
May I point out a blatant factual error in the decision of the Supreme Court’s Third Division. Briefly, the undisputed facts are: Sigma Rho fratmen were attacked by a bunch of men wielding weapons of mayhem. Right after the attack, they held their tongue on the identities of the attackers—except one victim, Mervin Natalicio, who said he “could not recognize the attackers because they were wearing masks.” Two responding UP policemen who brought him to the UP clinic and the UP physician who attended to him heard him say that.
“Their act of not disclosing the correct information to the UP Police or to Dr. xxx does not make the police officer or the doctor’s testimonies more credible than that of the victims,” the decision reads. That statement applied only to Natalicio, the one who really talked his head off! Hence, the ponente’s use of the determiner “their” was out of place. Be that as it may, he implied that what Natalicio disclosed was the wrong information as shown by the fact that he joined his other cofratmen in swearing to statements before the National Bureau of Investigation that they recognized the attackers because “their masks fell off”—four days later and after powwows with lawyers in their fraternity! The bottom line, Natalicio was the only one who pointed a finger at Soliva.
My point here is: The decision lumped Soliva with all the other accused and also applied against him the testimonies of the victims and other witnesses who allegedly saw what happened from different angles, although none of them placed Soliva anywhere near the scene of the crime! The decision added: “The fact that they went to the (NBI) four (4) days after the incident also does not affect their credibility since most of them had been hospitalized from their injuries and needed to recover first.”
Natalicio sustained only minor injuries; he was not hospitalized. Plain it is to see that what he was “recovering” from or trying to weasel out of was the truth he had “spontaneously” told the policemen and the physician right after the incident! By any measure of common sense and in the absence of any other evidence, “reasonable doubt” as to Soliva was staring any reader of that decision right in the face! By constitutional imperative, the presumption of innocence in Soliva’s favor should have set him free. Should not the Court en banc take a closer look at that patently unjust decision?
—CHIN CHIN KATIGBAK,cckatigbak@yahoo.com.ph