TERESITA SALCEDO-ORTANEZ, PETITIONER, VS. COURT OF APPEALS, HON. ROMEO F. ZAMORA, PRESIDING JUDGE, BR. 94, REGIONAL TRIAL COURT OF QUEZON CITY AND RAFAEL S. ORTANEZ, RESPONDENTS.

This is a petition for review under Rule 45 of the Rules of Court
which seeks to reverse the decision* of
respondent Court of Appeals in CA G.R. SP No. 28545 entitled “Teresita
Salcedo?Ortanez versus Hon. Romeo F. Zamora, Presiding Judge, Br. 94,
Regional Trial Court of Quezon City and Rafael S. Ortanez ”.

The relevant facts of the case are as follows:

On 2 May 1990, private respondent Rafael S. Ortanez filed with
the Regional Trial Court of Quezon City a complaint for annulment of marriage
with damages against petitioner Teresita Salcedo­-Ortanez, on grounds of lack
of marriage license and/or psychological incapacity of the petitioner. The complaint was docketed as Civil Case No.
Q-90­5360 and raffled to Branch 94, RTC of Quezon City presided over by respondent
Judge Romeo F. Zamora.

Private respondent, after presenting his evidence, orally
formally offered in evidence Exhibits “A” to “M”.

Among the exhibits offered by private respondent were three (3)
cassette tapes of alleged telephone conversations between petitioner and
unidentified persons.

Petitioner submitted her Objection/Comment to private
respondent’s oral offer of evidence on 9 June 1992; on the same day, the trial
court admitted all of private respondent’s offered evidence.

A motion for reconsideration from petitioner was denied on 23
June 1992.

A petition for certiorari was then filed by petitioner in
the Court of Appeals assailing the admission in evidence of the aforementioned
cassette tapes.

On 10 June 1993, the Court of Appeals rendered judgment which is
the subject of the present petition, which in part reads:

“It is much too obvious that the petition will have to fail, for
two basic reasons:

(1) Tape recordings
are not inadmissible per se. They
and any other variant thereof can be admitted in evidence for certain purposes,
depending on how they are presented and offered and on how the trial judge
utilizes them in the interest of truth and fairness and the even handed administration of justice.

(2) A petition for certiorari
is notoriously inappropriate to rectify a supposed error in admitting evidence
adduced during trial. The ruling on
admissibility is interlocutory; neither does it impinge on jurisdiction. If it is erroneous, the ruling should be
questioned in the appeal from the judgment on the merits and not through the
special civil action of certiorari. The error, assuming gratuitously that it exists, cannot be anymore than
an error of law, properly correctible by appeal and not by certiorari. Otherwise, we will have the sorry spectacle
of a case being subject of a counterproductive ‘ping­pong’ to and from the
appellate court as often as a trial court is perceived to have made an error in
any of its rulings with respect to evidentiary matters in the course of
trial. This we cannot sanction.

WHEREFORE, the petition for certiorari
being devoid of merit, is hereby
DISMISSED”.^[1]

From this adverse judgment, petitioner filed the present petition
for review, stating:

“Grounds
for Allowance of the Petition”

“10. The decision of
respondent [Court of Appeals] has no basis in law nor previous decisions of the
Supreme Court.

10.1 In affirming the
questioned order of respondent judge, the Court of Appeals has decided a
question of substance not theretofore determined by the Supreme Court as the question
of admissibility in evidence of tape recordings has not, thus far, been
addressed and decided squarely by the Supreme Court.

11. In affirming the questioned order of
respondent judge, the Court of Appeals has likewise rendered a decision in a
way not in accord with law and with applicable decisions of the Supreme Court.

11.1 Although the ques­tioned order is
interlocutory in nature, the same can still be [the] subject of a petition for cer­tiorari.”^[2]

The main issue to be resolved is whether or not the remedy of certiorari
under Rule 65 of the Rules of Court was properly availed of by the petitioner
in the Court of Appeals.

The extraordinary writ of certiorari is generally not available to
challenge an inter­locutory order of a trial court. The proper remedy in such cases is an ordinary appeal from an
adverse judgment, incorporating in said appeal the grounds for assailing the
interlocutory order.

However, where the assailed interlocutory order is patently
erroneous and the remedy of appeal would not afford adequate and expeditious
relief, the Court may allow certiorari as a mode of redress.^[3]

In the present case, the trial court issued the assailed order
admitting all of the evidence offered by private respondent, including tape
recordings of telephone conversations of petitioner with un­identified
persons. These tape recordings were
made and obtained when private respondent allowed his friends from the military
to wire tap his home telephone.^[4]

Rep. Act No. 4200 entitled “An Act to Prohibit and Penalize Wire
Tapping and Other Related Violations of the Privacy of Communication, and for
other purposes” expressly makes such tape recordings inadmissible in
evidence. The rele­vant provisions of
Rep. Act No. 4200 are as follows:

“Section 1. It shall be
unlawful for any person, not being authorized by all the parties to any private
communication or spoken word, to tap any wire or cable, or by using any other
device or arrangement, to secretly overhear, intercept, or record such
communication or spoken word by using a device commonly known as a dictaphone
or dictagraph or detectaphone or walkie-talkie or tape-recorder, or however
otherwise described. x x x”

“Section 4. Any
communication or spoken word, or the existence, contents, substance, purport,
or meaning of the same or any part thereof, or any information therein
contained, obtained or secured by any person in violation of the preceding
sections of this Act shall not be admissible in evidence in any judicial,
quasi-judicial, legislative or administrative hearing or investigation.”

Clearly, respondents trial court and Court of Appeals failed to
consider the afore-quoted provisions of the law in admitting in evidence the
cassette tapes in question. Absent a
clear showing that both parties to the telephone conversations allowed the
recording of the same, the in­admissibility of the subject tapes is mandatory
under Rep. Act No. 4200.

Additionally, it should be mentioned that the above-mentioned Republic
Act in Section 2 thereof imposes a penalty of imprisonment of not less than six
(6) months and up to six (6) years for violation of said Act.^[5]

We need not address the other arguments raised by the parties,
involving the applicability of American jurisprudence, having arrived at the
conclusion that the subject cassette tapes are inadmissible in evidence under
Philippine law.

WHEREFORE, the decision of the Court of
Appeals in CA-G.R. SP No. 28545 is hereby SET
ASIDE. The subject cassette
tapes are declared inadmissible in evidence.

SO ORDERED.

Narvasa, C.J., (Chairman), Regalado, Puno, and Mendoza, JJ., concur.

* Penned by Justice Emeterio C.
Cui with Justices Jainal D. Rasul and Alfredo G. Lagamon concurring.

^[1]
Rollo, pp. 24-25.

^[2]
Rollo, p. 11.

^[3]
Marcelo v. de Guzman, G.R. No. L-29077, 29 June 1982, 114 SCRA 657.

^[4]
TSN, 9 December 1992, p. 4.

^[5]
Sec. 2. Any person who wilfully or
knowingly does or who shall aid, permit, or cause to be done any of the acts
declared to be unlawful in the preceding section or who violates the provisions
of the following section or of any order issued thereunder, or aids, permits,
or causes such violation shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by
imprisonment for not less than six months or more than six years and with
accessory penalty of perpetual absolute dis­qualification from public office if
the offender be a public official at the time of the commission of the offense,
and, if the offender is an alien he shall be subject to deportation
proceedings.”