CA orders judge to stop trying Barrameda case

Relatives of Ruby Rose Barrameda, whose grisly murder stoked anger among anticrime advocates and the families of other victims of heinous crimes, may have to wait for justice to be served on their slain loved one.

On February 6, the Court of Appeals (CA) directed a lower court in Malabon to suspend indefinitely the hearings on the murder case filed by the parents of Barrameda, whose body was found stuffed in a steel drum dumped in the waters off Navotas City two years after she disappeared in 2007.

The ruling was based on a petition filed by Manuel Jimenez Jr., the victim’s father-in-law and one of the principal accused, which sought the inhibition from the case of Malabon Regional Trial Court Branch

170 Judge Zaldy Docena for his supposed bias in favor of Barrameda’s family.

The court said it was granting the suspect’s motion for the issuance of a writ of preliminary injunction pending the resolution of the case Jimenez filed against Docena.

Constitutional right

“To our mind, (Jimenez) had sufficiently established his right. As an accused, one of his constitutional rights is the right to be tried by an impartial judge,” the court said in a decision authored by Associate Justice Agnes Reyes-Carpio.

“Should we find (Docena) to have been partial, as claimed by (Jimenez), then the petitioner as an accused therein, is deprived of his right to an impartial trial,” it added.

Jimenez earlier claimed Docena committed grave abuse of discretion when he granted the petition filed by another accused, Manuel Montero, to be discharged as a state witness.

He also denounced Docena’s refusal to keep his hands off the case despite the fact that the head prosecutor, Theodore Villanueva, was the judge’s former classmate at Ateneo de Manila University.

Jimenez, who repeatedly denied allegations that he had a hand in the murder of Barrameda, reiterated that Montero’s testimony tagging him as the mastermind was “uncorroborated.”

The Office of the Solicitor General (OSG), however, questioned his petition, pointing out that an injunctive cannot be used to stop a criminal prosecution “since public interest requires that criminal acts be immediately investigated and prosecuted for the protection of society.”

The OSG argued that the rules of court allows accused like

Montero to be utilized by the government as a state witness.

Moot and academic

In its ruling, the appeals court said the resolution of Jimenez’s petition for the judge’s inhibition would be rendered moot if the lower court continued to hear Montero’s testimony.

In deference to the principle that injunctive orders should not restrain criminal prosecutions, the court said it did not immediately grant Jimenez’s petition for a temporary restraining order and waited for the OSG’s comment.

“Hence, there is no attempt on the part of the court to deviate from the general rule in issuing injunctions to restrain criminal prosecutions,” the appeals court said.