SC: Napoles must not be released

Janet Lim-Napoles. CONTRIBUTED FILE PHOTO

Janet Lim-Napoles should not be granted provisional freedom due to “a great presumption of guilt” on her part in the P10-billion pork barrel scam, the Supreme Court (SC) has ruled.

The high court’s latest decision could deal a fatal blow to Napoles’ attempt to gain temporary liberty by turning state witness to the raid on the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) that she herself allegedly designed.

The PDAF is a pork barrel that channeled funds to congressional districts. It was scrapped after the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in November 2013, following discovery of the pork barrel scam.

The full-court resolution was promulgated on Feb. 6, three weeks before Justice
Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II granted conditional state
protection to Napoles.

It was released two weeks ago, and the prosecution could use it to block Napoles’ attempts to get the Sandiganbayan to allow her bail in three plunder cases that had been brought against her and former Senators Bong Revilla, Juan Ponce Enrile and Jinggoy Estrada, and many others.

Napoles was taken back to a jail in Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig City after intervention by Solicitor General Jose Calida cleared the way for the reversal by the Court of Appeals of her conviction for illegal detention in May last year.

She spent only two years in the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong City following a guilty verdict meted out on her by a Makati City judge for the serious illegal detention of her cousin Benhur Luy, the primary whistleblower in the pork barrel scam.

No new arguments

In turning down another one of Napoles’ petitions, the tribunal said she did not present new arguments to warrant a reversal of its Nov. 7, 2017 ruling which sustained the two previous decisions of the Sandiganbayan that rebuffed her bail plea.

It also ruled that Napoles was wrong in invoking the justices’ previous resolution absolving former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, now a Pampanga representative, in the plunder case brought against her by the Office of the Ombudsman.

Unlike in Napoles’ indictment for plunder, the high court said it voided the antigraft court’s denial of Arroyo’s demurrer to evidence petition “based on the paucity of the evidence of the prosecution.”

“[The Ombudsman’s evidence] failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that [Arroyo] was the mastermind of the conspiracy to commit plunder,” the court said.

“In other words, there was a final determination of [Arroyo’s] innocence of the crime charged,” it said. “This is not the case for Napoles … [which] involved a preliminary determination of her eligibility to provisional liberty.”

The six-page ruling was written by Associate Justice Andres Reyes Jr. and was concurred in by 10 other justices who took part in the deliberation on Napoles’ pleading.

The justices reiterated that Napoles’ petition for bail did not “involve an inquiry as to whether there was proof beyond reasonable doubt that Napoles … was the main plunderer for whose benefit the ill-gotten wealth was amassed or accumulated.”

“These are matters of defense best left to the discretion of the Sandiganbayan in the resolution of the criminal case. It was sufficient that the denial of her bail application was based on evidence establishing a great presumption of guilt on the part of Napoles,” they said.

Besides, the high court said the Sandiganbayan was only required to ascertain “evident proof” that Napoles committed the allegations against her.

In Arroyo’s petition, it said the antigraft court was supposed to weigh the “prosecution’s entire evidence against the required moral certainty for the conviction of the accused.”