Jamelle Cornley FILE PHOTO
MANILA—A Quezon City court junked Tuesday a motion by American basketball player Jamelle Cornley, who is charged with thrashing a hotel and punching a policeman, for a reinvestigation and moved to another date Tuesday’s scheduled arraignment.
Judge Maria Gilda Pangilinan of the Quezon City Metropolitan Trial Court’s Branch 31 dismissed an April 5 “very urgent motion for the conduct of preliminary investigation” filed by lawyer Lino Dumas in behalf of Cornley. The American, he said, was in another country but did not say where.
In junking the motion, Pangilinan said that a preliminary investigation was allowed only in crimes punishable with over four years of imprisonment.
The revised rules of court specifically provide that a preliminary investigation is required to be conducted before the filing of a complaint or information for an offense where the prescribed penalty is at least four years, two months and one day.
Alarm and scandal is penalized with one day to a month in prison while direct assault is punishable with jail time of from two to four years.
Dumas said he would seek a reconsideration of the judge’s ruling but assured the court that while his client was abroad, Cornley was ready to face the charges of alarm and scandal and direct assault against him.
Pangilinan scheduled the American cager’s arraignment on June 11.
Tuesday’s deferment was the second for Cornley, who was originally supposed to have been arraigned on April 23.
Last month’s scheduled arraignment was postponed, along with all other hearings, to pave the way for the encoding of all cases for the electronic court system that the Supreme Court is planning to launch at the Quezon City Hall of Justice which was chosen by the high court as the pilot area for the program.
The charges against Cornley stemmed from a March 27 incident in which he allegedly disturbed the peace at the Sir William’s Hotel on Timog Avenue in Barangay (village) South Triangle and, in a drunken rage, assaulted Police Officer 2 Anselmo Lazatin. He was arrested by operatives of the Quezon City Police District Kamuning station shortly afterward.
Cornley played forward for Pennsylvania State University’s Nittany Lions and had stints as a cager in France, Israel, and Argentina before coming to the Philippines last year as an import by the PBA’s Rain or Shine Elasto Paint team, which he led to win the Governor’s Cup.