PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, PLAINTIFF-APPELLEE, VS. MARIO ABLAO, ISAGANI SACOP, LEOPOLDO DE GUZMAN, PEDRO LADIANA, ZENON SAMONTE, ALFREDO DEL MUNDO, BRUNO ABLAO, ISIDORO GALEMA, …

In the evening of July 6, 1980, Hon. Lotus Sobejana,
Sr., Municipal Judge of Lumban, Laguna, and his seven-year old son, Lotus, Jr., were shot and
killed.  They died almost instantly from
multiple gunshot wounds sustained on different parts of their bodies.  Thirteen (13) persons were indicted in the
then Circuit Criminal Court, Laguna, as co-conspirators in the two killings,
categorized by the Provincial Fiscal as double murder qualified by treachery
and evident premeditation.1

The persons indicted were the six (6) appellants herein — Mario Ablao, Isagani Sacop, Leopoldo de Guzman, Pedro Ladiana, Zenon Samonte and Alfredo del Mundo —
and seven (7) others:  Hector Samonte, David Ablao, Bruno Ablao, Isidro Galema, Danilo Mercado, Rustico Liwanag and Francisco Baldemeca.  All pleaded innocent on arraignment.

On September 17, 1982, in the course of trial, Judge Jose M. Aguila, then presiding over the Circuit Criminal Court,
dismissed the case as against three of the defendants:  Isidro Galema, Danilo Mercado and Rustico Liwanag for insufficiency of evidence and with the
conformity of the prosecution.2 During the trial, too, Bruno Ablao died, and Francisco Baldemeca
escaped from his detention cell in the Philippine Constabulary stockade in
Santa Cruz, Laguna, and has since remained at large.

After the prosecution had rested, Judge Maximiano
C. Asuncion succeeded Judge Aguila and received
evidence for the defense.  On February 1,
1985, he rendered judgment:

(1)     ACQUITTING Hector Samonte and David Ablao “(f)or lack of sufficient evidence;”

(2)     CONVICTING –

(a)          “MARIO
ABLAO, as principal by direct participation, PEDRO LADIANA, LEOPOLDO DE GUZMAN
and ISAGANI SACOP AS PRINCIPALS by conspiracy with Mario Ablao
* * of Two (2) separate MURDERS for the killing of Lotus Sobejana
and Lotus Sobejana, jr. with the qualifying circumstances of treachery and
evident premeditation, and the aggravating circumstances of nocturnity,
disregard of rank, respect and age respectively due the victims and with the
use of unlicensed firearm,” and SENTENCING “each of them * * to suffer the
maximum and supreme penalty of Two (2) separate DEATH PENALTY,” and

(b)          “Atty. ZENON
SAMONTE and ALFREDO DEL MUNDO * * as Accessory after the fact to the crimes of
Two (2) Separate MURDERS perpetrated by MARIO ABLAO in harboring and assisting
in the escape of the latter,” and SENTENCING
“each of them to suffer imprisonment of two (2) indeterminate penalties of
Twelve (12) Years and One (1) day of the maximum of Prision
Mayor to Twenty (20) Years of the maximum of Reclusion Temporal; and

(3)     further SENTENCING all
the accused “to pay, jointly and severally, the heirs of Judge Lotus Sobejana and his son, Lotus Sobejana,
Jr. the sum of P200,000.00 as actual and compensatory damages and P500,000.00
by way of moral damages with all the accessory penalties provided for by law
and to pay the costs.”3

In these appellate proceedings, all the convicted defendants pray
that the judgment of conviction be reversed and they be acquitted.  They contend that the Trial Court erred:

(1)     in
according credit to the identification of Mario Ablao
by Leoncia Alarcon y
Osorio, Judge Sobejana’s mother-in-law;

(2)     in
giving credence to the testimony of prosecution witnesses Pedro and Jose de los Reyes;

(3)     in
making certain findings and conclusions of fact not borne out by the evidence;
and

(4)     in
holding that there was conspiracy among the accused.4

Having reviewed the record, the Court finds merit in these pleas
sufficient to justify a reversal.

First, on the question of identification:  Based on the version offered by the
prosecution, besides the killer himself, two persons actually witnessed the
double murder — Felisa Alarcon,
the wife of Judge Sobejana, and her mother, Leoncia Osorio Alarcon.  The latter provided what the Trial Court
described as “explicit and positive” testimony identifying appellant
Mario Ablao as the triggerman, the decision pointing
out that she identified Ablao no less than four (4)
times; at the crime scene moments after the shooting, then twice in the course
of the investigation conducted by the Philippine Constabulary, and finally
during the trial when she picked him out from among the persons then present in
the courtroom.5
Closer examination shows, however, that such reliance has been largely
misplaced and that said witness’ testimony is not as strong and convincing as
it must have seemed to the Trial Court. 
All that appears to have been elicited from her while at the scene of
the crime immediately or shortly after its commission was that the killer was a
stranger wearing a hat, one, however, whom she would recognize if she saw him
again.6
The same sketchy description was given by her to PC Col. Pedro Lumbres on the following day, July 7, 1980.  True, about two weeks later at PC
Headquarters in Sta. Cruz, Laguna, Mrs. Alarcon
offered more details, such as that the killer was slim, fair-skinned, about
five feet five inches tall, sported slightly long hair, and wore a long-sleeved
fatigue shirt, denim pants and a buri hat,7
and supposedly picked Ablao out of a line-up; but the
credibility of this as well as of her subsequent identification of Ablao during trial, seriously suffers not only from the
length of time elapsed between their making and her encounter with the gunman
during the commission of the crime, but also because on these last two occasions,
Ablao was already established as a suspect — a
circumstance that may have colored her recollection and conditioned her mind to
identify Ablao as the unknown gunman whom she had
first seen for only the few brief moments that it took to carry out the double
killing.8

Moreover, there seems to be nothing in the record to show that Ablao fitted Alarcon’s later and
more detailed physical description of the killer, to wit and as already
stated:  slim, fair-skinned, five feet
five, etc., which was given two weeks after the event.

Identification evidence of this kind — at best, inconclusive —
cannot, standing alone, provide sufficient basis for a conviction.  Yet, it is not supported by any other
evidence, not even by that of the other eyewitness, Alarcon’s
own daughter, the widow Sobejana.  The latter, according to investigators, was
in a state of shock and too distraught to give any statement at the crime
scene.  But even after she had recovered
sufficiently, she failed to identify the assailant, though as she later
testified, she had known all the accused for a long time.9

Advertence is made to the extrajudicial statement of Eduardo
Mercado that he saw Ablao pass by the Lumban Academy on General Luna Street near the scene of the
crime a few minutes after the killings as corroborative of the testimony
identifying Ablao as the killer.10
However, any value that might attach to said statement is negated by Mercado’s
own later testimony disowning the same and claiming that he had been coerced by
the military into giving it.11

The failure of the identification evidence against Mario Ablao is equally fatal to the prosecution’s theory of
conspiracy which hinges upon, and has for an essential ingredient, the alleged
association of the other accused with Ablao in the planning
and commission of the double killing. 
The fact that the proof has failed to tag Ablao
as the one who did the actual killing renders ipso facto suspect
evidence the thrust and intendment of which is to show a conspiracy in which Ablao, and not any one of the other alleged conspirators,
was assigned and agreed to carry out the part of killer.  And, running true to the form that the other
proof for the prosecution in this case has taken, such evidence (of conspiracy)
is similarly difficult to credit, both intrinsically and because coming from
hardly pristine sources.

It was attempted to prove conspiracy among the accused through
the testimony of Pedro de los Reyes and Jose de los Reyes, father and son, which imputed to said accused
acts and conduct such as:  (a) their
entering the office of Judge Sobejana in the Lumban municipal hall on June 10, 1980 (not June 9, as
erroneously stated in the appealed decision) and uttering threats against his
life; (b) their reconnaisance of the place where the
killing took place two days before that event; (c) their having engaged in an
all-day drinking spree on the day of the killing in a nearby house belonging to
one of them (Zenon Samonte);
(d) their furtive, unusual and suspicious movements in or about the vicinity of
the crime scene on that same day before and after the killings; and (e)
overheard utterances like “nayari din,”
indicative of guilty knowledge.

Judge Asuncion, who wrote the appealed decision, never heard
these witnesses testify — as already observed, it was his predecessor, Judge
Jose M. Aguila, who heard the entire case for the
People — had little basis for approvingly adjudging their testimony as given
“* * in a straightforward and simple manner * *”12
and obviously giving it his full credence. 
This he did despite the existence of evidence not seriously contradicted
that these witnesses had their own axes to grind, grievances against the
appellants, which should have dictated more caution in evaluating the truth and
candor of what they said.  That evidence
is to the effect that the brothers Hector and Zenon Samonte and said witnesses had not only political
differences, but also disputes concerning lands retrieved from them by the Samonte family, to the possession and income of which they
felt themselves entitled; that Jose de los Reyes and
Benjamin de los Reyes had been dismissed from their
casual employment with the Bureau of Public Highways by Engineer Ruben Samonte, brother of Zenon; that a
collection suit had been filed against Pedro de los
Reyes by Samonte-owned Rural Bank of Lumban, and Zenon Samonte was a witness in a case of grave threats filed
against Pedro delos Reyes by Leopoldo
de Guzman;13
that appellant Pedro Ladiana had been Pedro de los Reyes’ political rival, who had bested him in the
election for barangay captain of Salac
in Lumban, and he (Ladiana)
had also been suspected by Pedro to be behind the petition of Salac residents denouncing the latter for mismanaging barangay affairs; that Jose de los
Reyes had had a quarrel with Ladiana inside a
precinct during the local elections, and Ladiana
claimed that Jose owed him some still unpaid gambling debts; that appellant Isagani Sacop, for his part, had
been suspected of stoning the house of Pedro de los
Reyes, for which Pedro, armed with a bolo had chased Sacop
and Jose de los Reyes had tried to stab him with a
knife; and that Pedro also had a score to settle with Leopoldo
de Guzman who had filed a still pending case against him for grave threats.14

Apart from these indicia of the Reyeses’
possible bias and motive to testify falsely, it simply is difficult to believe
that parties bent on a common felonious purpose would so recklessly advertise
their intentions and call attention to themselves by holding a day-long
drinking spree within plain sight of the place where they planned to kill their
victim that very same day, their actions visible to every curious eye; and when
not huddled together in drink, conspicuously skulking about the vicinity and
generally acting as if they were waiting for something out of the ordinary to
happen or were helping make it happen — actions that observers would in
hindsight equate with guilt.  The more
natural tendency of conspirators who had planned a killing and agreed to let
one of their number carry it out is for the rest to arrange to be somewhere
other than at the scene of the crime at its planned time of commission to avoid
any suspicion fastening upon them or provide themselves with alibis in case it
did.

The credibility of the appealed decision is not helped any by
indications that the Trial Judge had reached his own adverse conclusions about
appellant Ablao’s character, if not his guilt, even
before all the evidence was in and by the presence therein of findings to which
the recorded proofs offer no support except upon loose inferences.  It describes Ablao’s
alleged actions after the killing as those of a “professional killer”15
on apparently no more solid basis than that said appellant had earlier been
convicted and sentenced to death for what the Trial Judge described as a
“cold-blooded murder”16 in another case also heard by him
— said remarks being clearly uncalled for in the context in which they were
made and considering that Ablao was facing a capital
charge.  It credits the widow Sobejana with seeing, or declaring that she had seen, Ablao and Leopoldo de Guzman
reconnoitering the vicinity of the crime scene on July 4, 1980 and passing
through an alley later used as an escape route by Ablao
after shooting Judge Sobejana and his son.17
What is, however, of record as to her actual testimony is no more than that on
said occasion, Leopoldo de Guzman, accompanied by a
long-haired man wearing a fatigue-cloth jacket, maong
pants and buri hat (whom she did not however
recognize or identify as Ablao) had walked past where
she was seated on a bench in a neighbor’s house.18 Similarly, nothing in the
transcripts warrants describing as “frantic” or “unusual”
huddles and movements, as does the appealed decision,19
otherwise normal and commonplace actions on the part of some of the accused
like conversing while they walked past what was to become the scene of the
crime on their way to buy cigarettes. 
After linking David Ablao to the crimes by
stating that he must have accompanied the triggerman, Mario Ablao,20
the decision proceeds to acquit him for insufficiency of evidence, in effect
relegating that implicatory statement to the area of
mere surmise.  Of similar stripe is the
statement that the case seemed but another episode in the “vicious cycle
of cases in Lumban, Laguna traceable to factional
strife,”21
which, besides not being exactly relevant, appears to be a conclusion born of
the Trial Judge’s conception of the backgrounds of other cases he had tried
rather than on any evidence presented in this particular case.  In fact, from the wealth of observations made
in that judgment, it is not easy to separate what His Honor regarded as founded
on hard evidence from those which were simple speculation or conjecture.  Also — and though favorable to appellant Zenon Samonte, it is another
inconsistency, the appealed decision does not make clear why appellant Zenon Samonte was found guilty
only as an accessory after the fact notwithstanding its having found as fact
that the conspiracy was hatched in his own home, that he was the one who had
brought Mario Ablao there in the morning of the day
of the killings, and that he had been present in the Lumban
municipal building on that occasion of June 10, 1980 when the other appellants
had barged into the office of Judge Sobejana
allegedly with the intention of doing him bodily harm.23

Error was further committed in giving weight and credence to the
alleged confession of Francisco Baldemeca, one of the
original accused who escaped from detention and has since remained at large, as
evidence against Mario Ablao.  There having been no opportunity on the part
of the defense, which objected to its presentation,24
to examine Baldemeca about said confession, it is
inadmissible hearsay entitled to no consideration.25

On the whole and in view of the conspicuous deficiencies and
shortcomings of the evidence for the prosecution, whatever suspicions about the
complicity of the appellants in the killing of Judge Sobejana
and his son are not promoted to any reasonable certainty.  Said evidence, insufficient, in the Court’s
considered view after due examination and evaluation, to pinpoint Mario Ablao as the gunwielder or to
establish the existence a conspiracy among the appellants to take the lives of
said victims, fails to overcome the presumption of innocence and erase all
reasonable doubts of guilt.  The verdict
of the Trial Court and the respect and acceptance that by precedent its
findings of fact would otherwise ordinarily command notwithstanding, the
appellants are entitled to an acquittal.

WHEREFORE, the appealed decision is SET ASIDE and
REVERSED, and the appellants are ACQUITTED, with costs de oficio.

SO ORDERED.

Cruz, Gancayco, Grino-Aquino, and Medialdea, JJ., concur.

1
Rollo, p. 6; the case was docketed as Criminal
Case No. 2877

2
Original Record, vol. III, p. 530

3
Rollo, pp. 36-80

4
Appellants’ brief, pp. 23-24; Rollo, p. 103

5
Appealed Decision, supra; Rollo,
p. 62

6
TSN September 16, 1981, pp. 50-51

7
Witness’ statement given July 21, 1980

8
People vs. Aquino, 93 SCRA 772 (1979); People vs.
Delmendo, 109 SCRA 350 (1981)

9
TSN July 9, 1981, p. 65

10 Rollo, p. 62

11 TSN July 30, 1981, pp. 10-25

12 Appealed Decision; Rollo,
p. 72

13 TSN June 12, 1982, pp. 13-19

14 TSN July 23, 1981, pp. 42, 70-73

15 Rollo, p. 60

16 Rollo, p. 63

17 Rollo, p. 60

18 TSN July 9, 1981, pp. 36-37

19 Rollo, pp. 66, 70

20 Rollo, p. 66

21 Rollo, p. 62

22 Rollo, p. 66

23 Rollo, pp. 64-65

24 TSN
September 17, 1981, p. 38

25 People vs.
Amajul, 1 SCRA 682 (1961); People vs. Cabiltes, 25 SCRA 112 (1968)