THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, PLAINTIFF AND APPELLEE, VS. CRISPO LARA E ILANO, DEFENDANT AND APPELLANT.

This appeal has been brought upon appeal to the Supreme Court for
the purpose of reversing a judgment of the Court of First Instance of
the Province of Cavite, finding the appellant, Crispo Lara e llano,
guilty of the offense of murder and sentencing him to undergo
imprisonment for twenty years, cadena temporal, with the accessories
prescribed by law, and requiring him to indemnify the heirs of the
deceased in the amount of P1,000, and requiring him to pay the costs.

The deceased, Juan Advincula, was, in life, a resident of the barrio
of Salitran, in the municipality of Dasmariiias, Province of Cavite.
About three weeks prior to.the occurrence which gave rise to this
prosecution, the deceased was aroused in the nighttime by the barking
of his dog; and, upon looking into the cause of the noise, he found the
accused, Crispo Lara e llano, in his yard. Advincula thereupon asked
the accused what he was doing, and the latter replied that he was not
after anything. Advincula nevertheless scolded him, supposing that he
had designs upon the chickens in the stable. So strong was this
impression in the mind of Advincula that he reported the incident the
same night to the municipal authorities.

In the late afternoon of July 22, 1927, the date of the homicide,
Advincula was returning to his home, after having taken his carabao’s to
the corral of one Valentin Janoba. On the way he met the accused, and
as to what occurred in this encounter, we have only the statement of
Advincula, as delivered by him a short while thereafter in the house
of his neighbor, Felix Ramirez. According to this statement the accused
asked Advincula, “Are you angry at me?” Whereupon Advincula replied,
“How should I not be angry with you, since if my dog had not barked you
would have taken my chickens.” To this the accused replied, saying “You
are a liar,” at the same time firing an automatic revolver at
Advincula, wounding him in the left shoulder. Upon receiving this wound
Advincula fled.

Directing his course to the house of a neighbor, one Felix Ramirez,
Advincula found the family of Ramirez sitting at the table eating their
evening meal; and he told them that he had been shot by the appellant
under the circumstances above stated, at the same time exhibiting the
bloody stain on his left side. Ramirez at once called, or sent for, the
barrio lieutenant, one Ciriaco Reyes; and upon the arrival of the
latter, Advincula repeated his account of the occurrence, adding that
he was weak from the pain resulting from his wound and that he would
not survive. The next day the justice of the peace of the municipality,
one Restituto Paman, took Advincula’s affidavit (Exhibit C), in which
the declarant reiterated what he had told the lieutenant, but upon this
occasion he said he felt better and he indicated to the justice of the
peace that he thought he would not die of the wound. On the next day
Advincula was taken to the Philippine General Hospital in the City of
Manila where he remained for three weeks, at the end of which time he
was discharged. In a few days, however, the bullet, which had never
been extracted from the shoulder, began to make trouble again, and
Advincula was taken back to the hospital, where blood poisoning from
the internal wound soon developed and on August 30 Advincula died. A post-mortem examination showed that the bullet had lodged at the fifth rib on the left side and that the fourth and fifth ribs were broken.

Immediately following his conversation with Advincula in the house
of Ramirez, in the evening of July 22, 1927, Ciriaco Reyes, the barrio
lieutenant, went to the home of the accused, Crispo Lara, and was there
told that Lara had gone to get a doctor for his mother who was then in
the last stages of illness. It turned out, however, that Lara had fled
to Silang, a municipality about 13 kilometers distant from Dasmarinas.
Here he remained for about a week and did not return even for the
funeral obsequies of his mother, who in the meantime died.

The only testimony directly connecting the accused with the shooting
of the deceased is contained in the statements made by the deceased
subsequent to the shooting and prior to his death; and it is insisted
for the appellant that these statements are not admissible in evidence.
We are of the opinion that this contention is Well taken with respect
to the affidavit (Exhibit C) given to the justice of the peace by the
deceased on the day after the fatal injury was inflicted, for the
reason that when that declaration was made the deceased indicated that
he was under the impression that the injury would not be fatal. On the
other hand the statement made to Ciriaco Reyes, the barrio lieutenant,
in the house of Felix Ramirez, was in our opinion admissible as a dying
declaration, because when this declaration was made the deceased was
weak, complained of the pain which he was suffering from the wound and
stated that he would not survive. It is true that the deceased lived
for nearly six weeks after that statement was made, and in this
interval recovered, to external appearances, almost completely from the
wound. Nevertheless it appears that in the end the deceased died from
the same wound; and the admissibility of the first declaration depends
upon the state of mind of the deceased when the declaration was made,
and not upon the length of time that elapsed between the infliction of
the wound and the declarant’s death. This statement supplies ample
proof that the accused was the author of Advincula’s death.

With respect to the nature of the offense the Attorney-General suggests that it is murder, qualified by the circumstance of alevosia, and this view of the case was adopted by the trial court. The finding of alevosia
rests, it appears, exclusively upon the fact that, in the statement
made to Ciriaco Reyes, the deceased used the word “unexpectedly” in
describing the act of the accused in firing the fatal shot, meaning
that the act was unexpected to the deceased. But it appears that the
two actors in the homicide were confronting each other and the use of
the deadly weapon followed upon the words spoken by the deceased in
which he charged the accused with an attempt to steal his chickens.
These words were certainly of a provoking nature, whether true or
false; and we are of the opinion that the circumstance that the use of
a revolver by the accused may have been unexpected to the victim does
not, under the circumstances, show that the shooting was qualified by
treachery (alevosia) in the sense understood in the law, for
there was nothing in the means, form, or method of the killing which
could have been adopted for the purpose of insuring the execution of
the homicide without risk to the agent. The case in our opinion is
simple homicide, in which no aggravating or attenuating circumstance
should be estimated, with the result that the appellant is amenable to
imprisonment for a period within the medium degree of reclusion temporal.

It being understood, therefore, that the penalty of imprisonment is reduced to fourteen years, eight months and one day, reclusion temporal,
with the accessories incident thereto, the judgment, as thus modified,
is affirmed, with costs against the appellant. So ordered.

Avanceña, C. J., Johnson, Malcolm, Ostrand, Johns, and Romualdez, JJ., concur.