EN BANC
G.R. No. L-28655 August 6, 1928THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, plaintiff-appellee,
vs.
EUGENIO TOLEDO and SISENANDO HOLGADO, defendants.
EUGENIO TOLEDO, appellant.
C. V. Sanchez for appellant.
Attorney-General Jaranilla for appellee.
MALCOLM, J.:
This is an appeal taken by Eugenio Toledo from a
judgment of the Court of First Instance of Mindoro, finding him guilty
of the crime of homicide, and sentencing him therefor to imprisonment
for fourteen years, eight months, and one day, reclusion temporal, with the corresponding accessory penalties, indemnity, and costs.
Sisenando Holgado and Filomeno Morales had disputes
about the occupation of certain land situated in the municipality of
Pinamalayan, Province of Mindoro. On the morning of June 15, 1927, the
two men happened to meet. The argument was renewed, and they agreed to
fight. They did engage in a bolo duel with a fatal result for Filomeno
Morales, who was killed almost instantly. Sisenando Holgado was also
seriously wounded but was able to proceed to a neighboring house. From
there Sisenando Holgado was taken to the municipal building where he
made a sworn statement before the municipal president, in which he
declared that only he and Filomeno Morales fought. About one month
later, Sisenando Holgado died from the wounds received in the fight.
The prosecution and the defense alike agree on the
facts above outlined. The disputable point is whether the accused
Eugenio Toledo intervened in the quarrel and dealt a mortal blow to
Filomeno Morales. For the prosecution, there was presented the witness
Justina Villanueva, the querida of Filomeno Morales, who testified to
the presence and participation of Eugenio Toledo. Her testimony was
partially corroborated by that of the witness Justina Llave. On the
other hand, the theory for the defense was that Toledo was in another
place when the fight between Morales and Holgado occurred and that his
only participation was on meeting Holgado, who was his landlord or
master, in helping him to a nearby house. To this effect is the
testimony of the accused and of Conrado Holgado, the son of Sisenando
Holgado. The defense also relied upon the affidavit of Sisenando
Holgado, Exhibit 1, which was identified by the municipal president of
Pinamalayan.
Counsel de oficio in this court makes the following assignment of errors:
I. The lower court erred in not admitting in evidence Exhibit 1.
II. The lower court erred in not finding that
accused-appellant Eugenio Toledo did not take part in the fight between
accused Sisenando Holgado and deceased Filomeno Morales, resulting in
the death of the latter.
III. The lower court erred in not giving
accused-appellant Eugenio Toledo the benefit of a reasonable doubt."
Exhibit 1 above-mentioned in assignment of error No. 1, made originally
in Tagalog, in translation reads as follows:
AFFIDAVIT
His
SISENANDO HOLGADO
MarkIn the presence of:
(Sgd.) ILLEGIBLE
HILARION NIEVA
Signed and sworn to before me, this June fifteenth, 1927.(Sgd.) ILLEGIBLE
Municipal President
The discussion of the case in court has revealed
three different points of view among the members participating, all
leading to the same result of acquittal. Under such circumstances, it
is, course, difficult for the writer of the opinion to do entire justice
to those theories which do not conform to his own. However, an effort
will be made to present the various opinions, leaving it for any
individual member to enlarge upon the same, if he so desires.
I
The Chief and Mr. Justice Villamor would disregard
entirely the first assignment of error and would, therefore, refrain
from all discussion relative to the admissibility of Exhibit 1.
Confining themselves exclusively to an analysis of the evidence other
than Exhibit 1, they find that Eugenio Toledo has not been proved guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt. The contradictions in the testimony for the
prosecution pointed out by the trial judge do not impress these members
of the court so seriously. In reality, there being but one witness for
the prosecution who, on account of her relations with Filomeno Morales,
and the land troubles, might be expected to exaggerate, and there being
on the contrary exculpatory evidence for the defense, even without
Exhibit 1, the Government has not made out its case. Consequently, on
the testimonial facts, these members vote for acquittal.
II
The second view is that for which Messrs. Justices
Romualdez and Villa-Real are responsible, and is that Exhibit 1 should
have been admitted in evidence as part of the res gestae, and
that giving it effect, in relation with the other evidence, the accused
has not been proved guilty. What has heretofore been said with reference
to the state of the record need not here be repeated. It only remains
to be stated that Exhibit 1 was made by Sisenando Holgado on the same
morning that the fight occurred and without the interval of sufficient
time for reflection. The declaration of Sisenando Holgado fulfilled the
test of the facts talking through the party and not the party talking
about the facts. There was such a correlation between the statement and
the fact of which it forms part as strongly tends to negative the
suggestion of fabrication or a suspicion of afterthought. The nature and
circumstances of the statement do not disclose intrinsic evidence of
premeditation as revealed in a long, coherent, closely connected story.
The modern tendency is toward the extension of the rule admitting
spontaneous declarations to meet the needs of justice when other
evidence of the same fact cannot be procured. (22 C. J., pp. 461 et seq.; U. S. vs. David [1903], 3 Phil., 128.)
III
The third opinion in court is that held by Messrs.
Justices Street, Malcolm, and Ostrand, who would resolve the first
assignment of error by holding that the court erred in not admitting
Exhibit 1 as the statement of a fact against penal interest. Had Exhibit
1 been received, it is believed that its influence would have been felt
by the trial court. Without Exhibit 1, the appellate court is bound by
the appreciation of the evidence made in the trial court, and could,
with little propriety, set aside the findings made by a learned trial
judge. The case calls for an examination of the right of the courts to
receive in evidence documents of the character of Exhibit 1.
Hearsay evidence, with a few well recognized
exceptions, it has been said on high authority, is excluded by courts in
the United States that adhere to the principles of the common law. One
universally recognized exception concerns the admission of dying
declarations. Another exception permits the reception, under certain
circumstances, of declarations of third parties made contrary to their
own pecuniary or proprietary interest. But the general rule is stated to
be that the declarations of a person other than accused confessing or
tending to show that he committed the crime are not competent for
accused on account of the hearsay doctrine.
Professor Wigmore, one of the greatest living
authorities on the law of evidence, has attempted to demonstrate the
false premises on which the arbitrary limitation to the hearsay rule
rests. He shows that the limitation is inconsistent with the language
originally employed in stating the principle and is unjustified on
grounds of policy. Professor Wigmore in turn has been answered by no
less a body than the Supreme Court of Mississippi in the case of Brown vs.
State of Mississippi ([1910], 37 L. R. A., New Series, 345). The editor
of the Mississippi case in L. R. A., however, comes to the support of
Professor Wigmore saying the unanimity of the decisions "is as complete
as the shock which they give the general sense of justice." The question
has likewise in recent years gained attention by the Supreme Court of
the United States in the case of Donnelly vs. United States ([1913], 228
U. S., 243). There it was held that the court below properly excluded
hearsay evidence relating to the confession of a third party, then
deceased, of guilt of the crime with which defendant was charged. Mr.
Justice Pitney, delivering the opinion of the court, said: "In this
country there is a great and practically unanimous weight of authority
in the estate courts against admitting evidence of confessions of third
parties, made out of court, and tending to exonerate the accused." Mr.
Justice Van Devanter concurred in the result while Mr. Justice Holmes,
with whom concurred Mr. Justice Lurton and Mr. Justice Hughes,
dissented. Mr. Justice Holmes said:
. . . The rues of evidence in the main are based on
experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some
parts of the substantive law. There is no decision by this court against
the admissibility of such a confession; the English cases since the
separation of the two countries do not bind us; the exception to the
hearsay rule in the case of declarations against interest is well known;
no other statement is so much against interest as a confession of
murder; it is far more calculated to convince than dying declarations,
which would be let in to hang a man (Mattox vs. United States,
146 U. S., 140; 36 Law. ed., 917; 13 Sup. Ct. Rep., 50); and when we
surround the accused with so many safeguards, some of which seem to me
excessive; I think we ought to give him the benefit of a fact that, if
proved, commonly would have such weight. The history of the law and the
arguments against the English doctrine are so well and fully stated by
Mr. Wigmore that there is no need to set them forth at greater length.
(2 Wigmore, Evidence, pars. 1476, 1477.)
In the Philippine jurisdiction, we have never felt
bound to follow blindly the principles of the common law. A
reexamination of some of those principles discloses anomalies.
A dying declaration is admitted of necessity in
order, as the Supreme Court of Mississippi states, "to reach those man
slayers who perpetrate their crimes when there are no other
eyewitnesses." But the person accused of a crime, under the same
principle of necessity, is not permitted to free himself by offering in
evidence the admission of another under oath that this other committed
the crime. Again admissions are receivable against either a pecuniary or
a proprietary interest, but not against a penal interest. We fail to
see why it can be believed that a man will be presumed to tell the truth
in the one instance but will not be presumed to tell the truth in the
other instance. Again the exhibit would have been admitted against its
maker at his trial, if he had not died. But the document is held
inadmissible to exonerate another. Yet the truth of the exhibit is not
different in the first case that in the second.
A study of the authorities discloses that even if
given application they are not here controlling. Most of them do not
concern the confessions of declarants shown to be deceased. Practically
all of them give as the principal reason for denying the admission of a
confession of a third person that he committed the crime with which the
accused is charged, that it was not made under oath. Here the declarant
is deceased and his statements were made under oath. They also read in
such a way as to ring with the truth. When Sisenando Holgado declared
"When we fought, there was nobody present," it was at the end of just
such a rambling statement as a wounded man would be expected to make.
When Sisenando Holgado declared "I met one of my workers named Eugenio
Toledo, who accompanied me to the house of Dalmacio Manlisic," he did so
in response to a question by the municipal president. Exhibit 1 should
have been received not as conclusive evidence of innocence, but as
evidence to be taken into consideration in connection with the other
proven facts.
We cannot bring this decision to a conclusion without
quoting the well considered language of Professor Wigmore on the
subject, the pertinent part of a decision coming from a court which has
gained respect particularly in criminal cases, and an editorial note.
Professor Wigmore has said:
PAR. 1476. History of the Exception; Statement of Fact against Penal Interest, excluded; Confessions of Crime by a Third Person.
— It is today commonly said, and has been expressly laid down by many
judges, that the interest prejudiced by the facts stated must be either a pecuniary or a proprietary interest, and not a penal interest. What ground in authority there is for this limitation may be found by examining the history of the execution at large.
The exception appears to have taken its rise chiefly
in two separate rivulets of rulings, starting independently as a matter
of practice, but afterwards united as parts of a general principle. . . .
These lines of precedent proceeded independently till
about the beginning of the 1800s, when a unity of principle for some of
them came gradually to be perceived and argued for. This unity lay in
the circumstance that all such statements, in that they concerned
matters prejudicial to the declarant's self-interest, were fairly
trustworthy and might therefore (if he were deceased) be treated as
forming an exception to the hearsay rule.
This broad principle made its way slowly. There was
some uncertainty about its scope; but it was an uncertainty in the
direction of breadth; for it was sometimes put in the broad form that
any statement by a person "having no interest to deceive" would be
admissible. This broad form never came to prevail (post, par. 1576). But
acceptance was gained, after two decades, for the principle that all declarations of facts against interest (by
deceased persons) were to be received. What is to be noted, then, is
that from 1800 to about 1830 this was fully understood as the broad
scope of the principle. It was thus stated without other qualifications;
and frequent passages show the development of the principle to this
point.
But in 1884, in a case in the House of Lords, not
strongly argued and not considered by the judges in the light of the
precedents, a backward step was taken and an arbitrary limit put upon
the rule. It was held to exclude the statement of a fact subjecting the
declarant to a criminal liability, and to confined to statements of facts against either pecuniary or proprietary interest.
Thenceforward this rule was accepted in England; although it was
plainly a novelty at the time of its inception; for in several rulings
up to that time such statement had been received.
The same attitude has been taken by most American
courts, excluding confessions of a crime, or other statements of facts
against penal interest, made by third persons; although there is not
wanting authority in favor of admitting such statements.
PAR. 1477. Same: Policy of this Limitation. —
It is plain enough that this limitation, besides being a fairly modern
novelty, is inconsistent with the broad language originally employed in
stating the reason and principle of the present exception (ante, pars.
1457, 1476) as well as with the settled principle upon which confessions
are received (ante, par. 1475).
But, furthermore, it cannot be justified on grounds
of policy. The only plausible reason of policy that has ever been
advanced for such a limitation is the possibility of procuring
fabricated testimony to such a admission if oral. This is the ancient
rusty weapon that has always been drawn to oppose any reform in the
rules of evidence, viz., the argument of danger of abuse. This would be a
good argument against admitting any witnesses at all, for it is
notorious that some witnesses will lie and that it is difficult to avoid
being deceived by their lies. The truth is that any rule which hampers
an honest man in exonerating himself is a bad rule, even if it also
hampers a villain in falsely passing for an innocent.
The only practical consequences of this unreasoning
limitation are shocking to the sense of justice; for, in its commonest
application, it requires, in a criminal trial, the rejection of a
confession, however well authenticated, of a person deceased or insane
or fled from the jurisdiction (and therefore quite unavailable) who has
avowed himself to be true culprit. The absurdity and wrong of rejecting
indiscriminately all such evidence is patent.
The rulings already in our books cannot be thought to
involve a settled and universal acceptance of this limitation. In the
first place, in almost all of the rulings the declarant was not shown to
be deceased or otherwise unavailable as a witness, and therefore the
declaration would have been inadmissible in any view of the present
exception (ante, par. 1456). Secondly, in some of the rulings (for example, in North Carolina) the independent doctrine (ante,
pars. 139-141) was applicable that, in order to prove the accused's
non-commission of the offense by showing commission by another person,
not merely one casual piece of evidence suffices but a "prima facie"
case resting on several concurring pieces of evidence must be made out.
Finally, most of the early rulings had in view, not the present
exception to the hearsay rule, but the doctrine of admissions (ante, pars. 1076, 1079) that the admissions of one who is not a co-conspirator cannot affect others jointly charged.
It is therefore not too late to retrace our steps,
and to discard this barbarous doctrine, which would refuse to let an
innocent accused vindicate himself even by producing to the tribunal a
perfectly authenticated written confession, made on the very gallows, by
the rule culprit now beyond the reach of justice. Those who watched (in
1899) with self-righteous indignation the course of proceedings in
Captain Dreyfus' trial should remember that, if that trial had occurred
in our own courts, the spectacle would have been no less shameful if we,
following our own supposed precedents, had refused to admit what the
French court never for a moment hesitated to admit, — the authenticated
confession of the escaped Major Esterhazy, avowing himself the guilty
author of the treason there charged. (3 Wigmore on Evidence, 2d ed.,
secs. 1476, 1477.)
In the case of Pace vs. State ([1911], Court
of Criminal Appeals of Texas, 135 Southwestern, 379), the appellant
offered to prove in the trial court by the witness Byron Kyle that on
Saturday morning following the killing of the deceased on the previous
Sunday he had a conversation with Dick Cain, one of the parties to the
homicide, in which Dick Cain admitted the he killed the deceased. The
court ruled:
. . . Wherever the state seeks to fasten criminality
upon the party on trial, the accused had a right to meet and rebut any
testimony which may be offered against him in any legitimate way. If
Cain had been upon trial, his confession to the witness Kyle would have
been admissible beyond any shadow of doubt, and would have been upon
trial, his confession to the witness Kyle would have been admissible
beyond any shadow of doubt, and would have been strong evidence to go
before the jury. The estate would have been seeking to introduce this
and with great earnestness, and correctly so. If appellant could prove
that another party or others committed the homicide, it might prove his
innocence, and would be strong evidence to go before the jury in his
favor. Any legitimate fact or circumstance which would meet or tend to
meet the state's case and break the force of criminative facts
introduced against the accused is always admissible. Appellant's
contention was that he did not kill the deceased, but that Cain did. The
state's theory was the appellant shot the deceased, and Cain did not
shoot him. Under the rules of evidence this testimony was clearly
inadmissible.
We would like finally to turn attention to what was
said by the editor of L. R. A. in his note in volume 37 hereinbefore
referred to, viz:
The purpose of all evidence is to get at the truth.
The reason for the hearsay rule is that the extrajudicial and unsworn
statement of another is not the best method of serving this purpose. In
other words, the great possibility of the fabrication of falsehoods, and
the inability to prove their untruth, requires that the doors be closed
to such evidence. So long therefore as a declarant is available as a
witness, his extrajudicial statement should not be heard. Where,
however, the declarant is dead or has disappeared, his previous
statements, out of court, if not inadmissible on other grounds, are the
best evidence. But they are not rendered inadmissible by the mere fact
that the declarant is unavailable, — something else is necessary. One
fact which will satisfy this necessity is that the declaration is or was
against the declarant's interest, and this is because no sane person
will be presumed to tell a falsehood to his own detriment.
x x x x x x x x x
Again, if, seems indisputable, the desire to close
the door to falsehood which cannot be detected dictates the exclusion of
such testimony, the question as to the effect to be given to such a
confession is solely one of weight and credibility. . . .
Any man outside of a court and unhampered by the
pressure of technical procedure, unreasoned rules of evidence, and
cumulative authority, would say that if a man deliberately acknowledged
himself to be the perpetrator of a crime and exonerated the person
charged with the crime, and there was other evidence indicative of the
truthfulness of the statement, the accused man should not be permitted
to go to prison or to the electric chair to expiate a crime he never
committed. Shall Judges trained and experienced in the law display less
discerning common sense that the layman and allow precedent to overcome
truth?
JUDGMENT
For three somewhat divergent reasons, we are all of
the opinion that the defendant-appellant Eugenio Toledo should be given
the benefit of the reasonable doubt which prevails in our minds.
Accordingly, the judgment appealed from will be reversed and the
defendant and appellant acquitted, and as it appears that he is now
confined in Bilibid Prison, an order will immediately issue directing
his release, with costs de oficio.
Avanceña, C.J., Street, Villamor, Ostrand, Romualdez and Villa-Real, JJ., concur.
No comments:
Post a Comment