Massacre victims’ kin suing Arroyo exempt from court fees

A Quezon City court has allowed two relatives of the 2009 Maguindanao massacre victims to sue as indigents who need not pay court fees in a P15-million damage suit against former President and now Pampanga Representative Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Judge Catherine Manodon of regional trial court Branch 104 exempted Zenaida Duhay and Noemi Parcon from paying court docket fees, citing their meager incomes.

The judge noted that Duhay, widow of victim Jose Jhoy Duhay, earns P3,800 a month from a parttime teaching job and P8,000 from a dry goods store while receiving a P5,000 allowance from her son.

Parcon, widow of victim Joel Parcon, has a job that earns her P10,000 to P12,000 a month, and a variety store that makes P4,000 a month.

“From the evidence adduced, this court is convinced that plaintiffs Parcon and Duhay are incapable of paying the docket fees in this case,” Manodon said in an order dated June 21.

Docket fees for a P15-million civil case would amount to around P200,000, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyer Rommel Bagares.

In October last year, the court granted the same exemptions to 12 other relatives of the massacre victims. The latest order formally added Duhay and Parcon to the list of individuals who lodged the damage suit against Arroyo in 2011.

The plaintiffs argued that Arroyo—currently detained on charges of plunder—was liable in the civil action for being the President at the time of the killings, where the principal accused came from a clan who was among her key political allies in Mindanao.

Members of the Ampatuan clan led by Andal Ampatuan Jr. are on trial for 58 counts of murder before Judge Jocelyn Solis-Reyes of the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 221. The victims included 32 media workers. Julie M. Aurelio