The Supreme Court has upheld the conviction of a policeman who was found guilty of the 1996 murder of a fellow officer who exposed irregularities in a Valenzuela City precinct.
The high court’s Second Division not only affirmed the verdict handed down by the Manila Regional Trial Court but also imposed a heavier punishment on SPO1 Alfredo Alawig.
It modified the lower court’s sentence to reclusion perpetua “without parole” and increased the damages that Alawig had to pay the victim’s family from P450,000 to P1.68 million.
The SC decision dated Sept. 18 was written by Justice Mariano del Castillo, with division chair Justice Antonio Carpio and members Justices Roberto Abad, Jose Perez and Estela Perlas Bernabe concurring.
Alawig, along with SPO2 Enrique Dabu and four other policemen, were accused of conspiring to murder their colleague, PO1 Miel Cafe, at the police precinct in Marulas, Valenzuela, in November 1996.
The suspects were initially charged with homicide and were allowed to post bail. But the charges were upgraded to murder and refiled in the Manila RTC in 1999.
Only Alawig and Dabu were arrested, while the other suspects—SPO4 Ponciano Miraples, PO2 Armando de Vera and PO2 Vicencio Corpuz—remained at large.
Another officer linked to the crime, PO3 Romeo Ventinilla, was shot dead in February 2001 by fellow lawmen who encountered him as a member of a robbery gang in Rodriguez, Rizal province.
According to court records, Cafe was fetched by colleagues for an antidrug operation shortly before he was murdered. He was able to call a friend and ask for help just when the other officers were about to kill him. Cafe’s bullet-riddled body was later found inside the Marulas precinct.
During the trial, Dabu claimed he was not present when Cafe was shot, while Alawig said it was Ventinilla who had an argument with Cafe that day over Ventinilla’s alleged involvement in illegal drugs.
Alawig said Cafe went berserk and was shot by Ventinilla only in self-defense.
The victim’s mother Percelita, however, testified that her son once told her that he had earned the ire of his peers and superior over the arrest of a drug pusher who turned out to have “police protectors.”
The trial also revealed that Cafe had exposed the disappearance of 19 kilos of “shabu” which he and his colleagues earlier seized from a Taiwanese man, with only 20 grams reaching the crime laboratory.
In May 2005, a Manila RTC judge found Alawig and Dabu guilty of murder and sentenced them to death. Capital punishment was abolished in the country in June the following year.
The Court of Appeals upheld the guilty verdict in November 2008 but reduced their sentence to reclusion perpetua, or a maximum of 40 years in prison.
Only Alawig appealed the verdict in the Supreme Court.
In its decision, the high tribunal upheld the lower court’s reliance on the circumstantial evidence that led to the conviction. The justices gave no credence to Alawig’s claim that Ventinilla was the sole perpetrator of the killing.
They noted forensic findings that Cafe tested negative for gunpowder residue, that his M16 rifle was probably fired “after he died”; and that his gunshot wounds indicated he was killed by several attackers who apparently used .38-cal. pistols.
Alawig, on the other hand, tested positive for gunpowder residue, they noted.
The Supreme Court also noted the findings of the lower court that entries in the Marulas precinct’s log book were tampered with to make it appear that the accused were deployed in the field at the time of the crime.
“All these taken together suffice to show that appellant conspired with the other accused in the killing of the victim,” the ruling said. “There is evidence that the accused performed specific acts in the conspiracy to kill the victim as well as to cover up the same.”