MANILA, Philippines—The camp of Ruby Rose Barrameda, whose body was found stuffed inside a steel case off the waters of Navotas in 2009, has decided to wait for the Court of Appeals to decide on a petition filed by one of the accused before asking the Supreme Court to allow hearings on the case at a local court to resume.
According to Franklin Sunga, private counsel to Rochelle Barrameda-Labarda, the victim’s sister, they chose not to seek relief from the highest court of the land as of yet since the appellate court’s subsequent ruling on the main case — a petition that sought the inhibition of Branch 170 Judge Zaldy Docena and questioned the discharge of Manuel Montero, one of the accused, as a state witness, among others — would also affect the preliminary injunction that stopped proceedings on the Barrameda case at the Malabon Regional Trial Court.
The petition was then filed by Manuel Jimenez, Jr.
“We’ll just wait for (the CA ruling) since the resolution of the main case also affects the injunction,” Sunga told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
On February 6, the Court of Appeals directed Branch 170 of the Malabon RTC to suspend indefinitely its hearings on the Barrameda case, saying that it had yet to rule on Jimenez Jr.’s allegations of partiality against the judge.
Jimenez Jr. then said that Docena committed grave abuse of discretion when he granted the petition filed by Montero to be discharged as state witness.
He also decried Docena’s refusal to keep off the case despite the fact that the head prosecutor, Theodore Te, was his classmate at Ateneo de Manila University.
Although Barrameda-Labarda slammed the Court of Appeals ruling, her lawyer then said that they were still weighing the pros and cons of immediately elevating the matter of the issuance of the preliminary injunction to the highest court of the land.
Sunga said that he would first consult with Barrameda-Labarda and representatives from the Office of the Solicitor General prosecuting the case.
“We will definitely not elevate the case to the SC yet,” Sunga said when again asked by the Inquirer.
According to the lawyer, he believed that the appellate court, after all, would issue a speedy resolution on the main issue of a “high-profile” case,
Should the appellate court rule in favor of the accused, Sunga said that would be the time they would seek relief from the Supreme Court.