THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, PLAINTIFF AND APPELLEE, VS. PEDRO NARVAES, DEFENDANT AND APPELLANT.

Charged with homicide, the herein
appellant, on May 13, 1933, was convicted of said crime and sentenced
by the Court of First Instance of Laguna to fourteen years, eight
months and one day of reclusion temporal, with the corresponding
accessory penalties, to indemnify the heirs of his victim Benito de
Silva in the sum of P1,000, and to pay the costs of the proceedings. He
appealed from that sentence, and now assigns the following alleged
errors as committed by the trial court, to wit:

“I. The court a quo erred in not holding that the defendant Primo Narvaes acted in self-defense.

“II. The trial court erred in not sustaining that Benito de Silva’s ante-mortem declaration (Exhibit 8) was not admissible as evidence.

“III. The court a quo erred in not declaring that the defendant’s true name is Primo Narvaes instead of Pedro Narvaes.

“IV. The trial court erred in sentencing the accused to fourteen (14) years, eight (8) months and one (1) day of reclusion temporal;
to suffer the corresponding accessory penalties; to indemnify the heirs
of the deceased in the sum of P1,000; to pay the costs, and in not
acquitting the defendant.”

It has been established without question that on August 28, 1932,
in the barrio of Pitlan of the municipality of Cabuyao, Province of
Laguna, the appellant inflicted on Benito de Silva three wounds, one,
an inch long, on the left elbow; another, four inches long and
triangular in form, on the upper part of the right arm, penetrating the
entire thickness of the deltoid muscle, and another, five inches long,
on the upper left side of the abdominal region, exposing his
intestines. It is stated in the medical certificate Exhibit A that the
wounds in question were caused by a sharp pointed instrument, and the
oral evidence on that point is to the effect that they were caused by
the penknife Exhibit C.

Benito de Silva died as the result of his wounds a few minutes after eight o’clock on the night of September 1, 1952.

The evidence of both the prosecution and the defense agrees on the
following facts: That the deceased Benito de Silva was the foreman of
one of several groups of tenants of the Calamba Sugar Estate; that for
several years the appellant was one of the tenants belonging to that
group under the supervision of said Benito de Silva, and as such
tenant, said appellant and the other members of the group were, on the
morning in question, obliged to plow a part of the hacienda where they
worked, and that, when the other tenants were already busy at their
work the appellant was still engaged in threshing palay close
to where the others were plowing. Both parties also agree on the fact
that Benito de Silva, upon seeing that the appellant had not yet joined
the other tenants in the work they had to perform that morning, rebuked
said appellant in the following or similar words: “We are already
plowing here and you still are engaged in threshing palay;
are you not ashamed of yourself?” They likewise agree in that the
appellant forthwith left his work in order to get his plow and carabao,
with which he returned a few minutes later.

The evidence of the prosecution further shows that after the
appellant had made two turns with his plow on the land which he and his
companions were plowing, he stopped to await the arrival of Benito de
Silva. When De Silva had come near enough, the appellant, with his
right hand in his pocket, told the former that he had embarrassed him
before his companions with the remarks he had made a few moments
before, and, without hearing any further explanation, he forthwith
attacked De Silva with the penknife with which he was armed, as it
later turned out, inflicting upon said De Silva the three wounds
hereinbefore described.

The defense tried to prove that when the appellant was already
plowing, the deceased continued to insult him saying that he and his
father were lazy and that both were “hijos de p. . . .”; that the
appellant answered the deceased asking him not to insult him so much
because he was already plowing; that the deceased, who was bigger than
the said appellant, disgusted at the latter’s answer, caught him by the
neck, choking him until his fingers sank deep in the flesh, and later
throwing him to the ground; that while the appellant lay on the ground,
the deceased mounted on top of him and placed his knee on the
appellant’s abdomen without loosening his grip on his neck; and that it
was under these circumstances when the appellant remembered his
penknife and with it dealt the deceased several blows, inflicting upon
him the three wounds above-described. It is on these grounds that the
appellant pleads justification of his acts, insisting that he justly
acted in self-defense.

After properly and carefully analyzing and weighing the evidence of
both the prosecution and the defense, this court cannot escape the
conclusion that the evidence of the former carries more weight and
deserves more credit than that of the latter.

According to the testimony of the eyewitness Ambrosio Dimapilis,
who was one of the four tenants who were plowing on that occasion, not
counting the deceased, the appellant was the aggressor. The appellant
himself, giving his version of the crime to police sergeant Francisco
Villanueva, who arrested him shortly thereafter, and while he was being
conducted to the office of the municipal police of Canlubang, stated
that he inflicted the knife-wounds on the deceased because the latter
had made certain insulting remarks to him.

The defense claims that the remarks made by the deceased were not
sufficient to provoke the appellant and contends that, not being so, it
was impossible for the appellant to have felt so suddenly offended as
to immediately resort to violence for the purpose of avenging with
bloodshed and insult which in fact never existed. Such remarks might
not have been insulting to some but the truth is that in the case under
consideration they were so to the appellant. The reason for this is
that there are moments in which, when a person is not in his right mind
or his judgment is not calm and clear—and it may be assumed-that at
that time the appellant was in such state of mind because he was
prevented from finishing a task which he had began— the most harmless
remarks seem to be insulting and provoking, particularly taking into
consideration the tone, the occasion, and the circumstances under which
they are uttered.

The testimony of the appellant’s mother and that of his witnesses
Valentin Carandang and Joaquin Prescilla, who claimed to have witnessed
the crime, his mother, very closely, and the other witnesses, from a
distance of thirty armlengths, are undeserving of credit for several
reasons, to wit: (1) The appellant’s mother testified that she had
approached the deceased to beg him to spare her son’s life but that she
walked away because the said deceased told her that he would also
strangle her; and the other two witnesses, in turn, testified that the
said woman did not approach the deceased but remained at a distance of
ten arm-lengths from him, confining herself to shouting for help. Be
that as it may, it is improbable that the appellant’s mother would
merely confine herself to shouting for help without approaching her son
for the purpose of helping him herself, seeing as she in fact saw,
according to her testimony, that her son’s aggressor was unarmed,
because it is instinctive in every mother to run to the aid of her son
when he is in danger, as the appellant was on that occasion; (2) at
that time the said two witnesses were residents of the barrio of
Bagbag, Tanauan, Batangas, a far distant town from Cabuyao, which is
within the Province of Laguna and where the crime was committed, and it
is a singular coincidence that they should be passing by the scene of
the crime precisely at the time the same was being committed, and it is
highly improbable that they, being the appellant’s friends and
townmates, would merely leave the place without inquiring of him the
cause of his fight with the deceased, particularly after having seen
that the said deceased emerged therefrom with several wounds and that
he fell to the ground, unable to arise, facts which must necessarily be
assumed to have been witnessed by them if their testimony that they had
really seen the fight is to be accepted, because the truth is that
after the deceased had received the wound on his abdomen, he fell to
the ground with his intestines exposed; (3) the wound on the shoulder
of the deceased is inconceivable unless the theory of the defense that
the appellant inflicted it while he was lying on the ground, face
upwards, with the deceased on top of him and one of the latter’s knees
on his abdomen, is rejected, and the reason for this is that inasmuch
as the appellant had the weapon in his right hand while he was lying
face upwards and being held by the neck by the deceased who was on top
of him, according to the same theory of the defense, the wound should
have been inflicted on the left shoulder of the deceased, not on the
right.

With respect to the third alleged error, which the appellant claims to have been committed by the court a quo,
the weight of the evidence shows that the appellant’s true name is
Pedro Narvaes, not Primo Narvaes. Exhibits 2 and F, which are the
baptismal certificates of Primo Narvaes and Pedro Narvaes,
respectively, and which were duly admitted without any objection on the
part of the defense, show that the said two persons are brothers by the
same father and mother and are furthermore grandsons of the same
paternal and maternal grandparents.

According to Exhibit F, Pedro Narvaes was born on January 17, 1913,
and is the son of Leoncio Narvaes, a native of Bagongbayan, in the
municipality of Tanauan, Batangas, and of Teodora Castillo, of the same
barrio and town, and that he is the grandson of Geronimo and Francisca
Reyes on his father’s side, and of Eustaquio and Dorotea Molinyane on
his mother’s side, his godfather being Eugenio Quiachon.

According to Exhibit 2, Primo Narvaes was born on June 9, 1915, and
is the son of Lucio Narvaes, a native of Bagongbayan, Tanauan, and of
Teodora Castillo, also of the same barrio of Bagongbayan, Tanauan, and
is a grandson of Geronimo and Francisca Reyes on his father’s side, and
of Eustaquio and Dorotea Molinyane on his mother’s side, his godfather
being Julio Austria.

It will be noted that the said two documents, Exhibits 2 and F,
coincide in their statement that the children therein referred to are
sons of the same mother and grandsons of the same grandparents. The
only difference that may be noted relates to the name of the alleged
father of the said children for, while the first certificate gives
Leoncio as the name of Primo’s father, the second states that the name
of Pedro’s father is Lucio. This discrepancy, however, is of no
consequence because Leoncio and Lucio sound practically the same, and
the error in their spelling must have been due to carelessness on the
part of the clerk who prepared and wrote in the baptismal record of the
parish of Tanauan, Batangas, the two entries from which the documents
in question were copied. Were not this sufficient to show that the
herein appellant is really the elder son of the spouses Teodora
Castillo and Lucio Narvaes, the record of the case supplies other data
as deserving of credit, if not more so, than the documentary evidence
above stated. The residents of the Calamba Sugar Estate, who had
testified in this case as witnesses for the prosecution and who know
the appellant and his entire family, maintain, and the census of the
said hacienda’s tenants shows, that the appellant is the same Pedro
Narvaes, elder son of the spouses Leoncio or Lucio Narvaes and Teodora
Castillo, not Primo Narvaes, who is the second son of the said spouses,
and who does not live with them during the schoolyear because he is
studying in another municipality different from Cabuyao, Laguna.
Furthermore, when the appellant was arraigned under the name of Pedro
Narvaes, which is the name appearing in the information, he merely
entered his plea of “not guilty” under the said name. It was on that
occasion that he should have for the first time raised the question of
his identity, by filing a demurrer based on the court’s lack of
jurisdiction over his person, inasmuch as he was then considered as
Pedro Narvaes, not Primo Narvaes. Not having filed the said demurrer,
it must necessarily be understood that he renounced it and therefore he
is now estopped from raising, or insisting to raise, the same question,
not only in this appeal but even at the trial. Therefore, whether the
said question be considered from one angle or another, at all events,
the conclusion must be the same, that is, that the trial court did not
err in considering the appellant as Pedro Narvaes, not as Primo Narvaes.

As to the last alleged error relied upon by the appellant in his brief,
it should be stated that, from what the record discloses and according
to the above statement of the facts of the case, and also according to
the foregoing considerations, the act committed by the appellant
clearly constitutes the crime of homicide, which is penalized by
article 249 of the Revised Penal Code with reclusion temporal
in its full extent. Inasmuch as there is no evidence of record showing
the presence of any aggravating or mitigating circumstance at the
commission of the crime, which may serve to modify the said appellant’s
liability, the penalty which he deserves is reclusion temporal
in its medium period, that is, from fourteen years, eight months and
one day to seventeen years and four months. (Article 64, rule 1, of the
Revised Penal Code.) Therefore the appealed sentence is in accordance
with law.

Wherefore, the said sentence is hereby affirmed in toto,
with costs against the appellant. However, in view of Act No. 4103,
which provides for an indeterminate sentence, and taking into
consideration the youth of the appellant, who had scarcely arrived at
the age of 19 years when he committed the crime, the minimum of the
said penalty imposed upon him is hereby fixed at six years and one day
of prision mayor, so that the same shall be understood to be from six years and one day of prision mayor to fourteen years, eight months and one day of reclusion temporal. So ordered.

Street, Abad Santos, Butte, and Goddard, JJ., concur.