[ G.R. No. 4947. November 11, 1909 ] 14 Phil. 416
[ G.R. No. 4947. November 11, 1909 ]
THE UNITED STATES, PLAINTIFF AND APPELLEE, VS. PABLO RAYMUNDO ET AL., DEFENDANTS AND APPELLANTS. D E C I S I O N
CARSON, J.:
Several months after judgment was rendered in this case in the court below, counsel submitted to this court a motion for a new trial on the ground of newly discovered evidence. Upon this motion final ruling was reserved, in accordance with the practice uniformly followed heretofore, pending our review of the whole record after submission of the appeal upon its merits. A number of affidavits were submitted in support of the motion, whereby counsel for appellants undertake to establish their contention that upon a new trial, newly discovered evidence can, and will be introduced, which, if it does not conclusively establish the innocence of the appellants of the crime of which they have been convicted, will at least raise a reasonable doubt as to their guilt. This evidence consists; First, of a sworn retraction by the principal witness for the prosecution, Juliana Gutierrez, of her testimony given at the trial, which she now states, under oath, was false in every essential particular, and given at the trial under the inspiration of Captain Crame, a police officer, who forced her to testify as she did by the use of threats and violence; second, of the sworn statement of this witness that she saw the defendant Pablo Raymundo being maltreated by a police officer for the purpose of compelling him to make the confession of his guilt which was offered in evidence at the trial; third, of evidence tending to disclose that the deceased had an engagement with a certain woman of ill-repute on the night when he came to his death, and that had he undertaken to keep this engagement, he would not and could not have been in the place where the prosecution alleges, and the findings of the trial court declare he was, when he was murdered; and fourth, of evidence as to conditions existing in and around the place where the dead body was found, and of the absence of blood in the yard of the house of the defendant Arcangel, which in the opinion of counsel for the appellants sustains their contention in the court below that the deceased could not have been done to death in the house of Arcangel, and the dead body after-wards carried to the place where it was found, as alleged by the witnesses for the prosecution and set out in the findings of fact by the trial court. The Solicitor-General opposed the motion for a new trial on the ground that only one of the affidavits upon which it is based discloses the existence of newly discovered evidence which could not have been discovered and submitted in the court below by the exercise of due diligence on the part of the appellants and their counsel; and because the alleged newly discovered evidence is not evidence which if it were submitted on a new trial would necessarily, or even probably change the result arrived at in the original proceedings. We are satisfied that no amount of diligence on the part of the appellants, or their counsel, could have secured the retraction of the testimony of Juliana Gutierrez in time to take advantage thereof in the court below; and, while it is true that most if not all of the other affidavits set out alleged facts which, if true, might perhaps have been developed during the trial by the exercise of due diligence, we would not be disposed to apply, in all their rigor, the, technical rules touching the granting of new trials on the ground of newly discovered evidence, in a case involving the imposition of the death penalty, if in our opinion, the evidence submitted were such that if introduced upon a new trial it would probably and properly result in an acquittal. As we understand it the granting or denial of a motion for a new trial on the ground of newly discovered evidence lies in the sound judicial discretion of the court to which it is directed to be determined as the interests of justice may demand, when the movements have brought themselves within the well-known rules governing the submission of such motions; but the state being not less, interested than the individual accused of a crime in his acquittal if he is innocent, these rules should be construed and applied with marked liberality in cases, such as that under consideration, wherein the life of an accused person is at stake. We have, therefore, directed our attention to the contents of the affidavits submitted in support of the motion, more especially with a view to determine whether a different result would and should be arrived at, if on a new trial, in accordance with the practice heretofore adopted by this court, the record were returned to the court below with instructions to reopen the different cases against the appellants, and take the evidence of all the affiants in support of the motion for a new trial, and such other and additional evidence as the reopening of these cases might render proper and necessary. Without attempting to enter upon an exhaustive comparative analysis and review of the voluminous record brought here on appeal, examined together with the alleged facts developed by the affidavits submitted by the movents, we might summarize our conclusions as to the probative value of the facts alleged by the various affiants, other than Juliana Gutierrez, by saying that, assuming that the record before us contained the testimony of these witnesses to the precise facts set out in their affidavits, such evidence could not and should not change or modify our conclusions as to the guilt of the appellants. The mere fact, if it be a fact, that the policeman Delgado had an engagement to meet a woman of ill repute after going off duty on the night on which he was murdered, is in itself of small probative value, if indeed it can be said to have any value whatever, in rebuttal of direct evidence to the fact that immediately after being relieved, he went into a house just off his beat, to talk with and to be entertained by Juliana Gutierrez, or perhaps merely to rest for a little while after the labors of the day—and it is chiefly, if not solely for this purpose, that the affidavits touching this alleged engagement are submitted. So the negative testimony contained in the statements of the affiants who say that on the morning after the murder they did not observe any traces of blood in the yard of Arcangel through which the trial judge held that the dead body of the policeman was carried to the place where it was found, has but little weight in rebuttal of the testimony of an eyewitness to the incident, substantially corroborated as it is as to one, at least, of the defendants by his extra-judicial confession and admissions, and indirectly corroborated as to all by the testimony of the witnesses who testified affirmatively to the discovery of unexplained traces of blood on the floor of the room in the house of the defendant Arcangel where the trial judge found the murderous attack was made, and on the stairs and path leading therefrom in the direction of the place where the body was found; and this, more especially, because at the time when they allege they were at the scene of the crime on the morning after it was committed, none of them had any reason to suspect that the deceased had not been done to death where he lay, so that the fact that they did not observe traces of blood along the route over which later developments tended to disclose that the dead body had been carried, is in nowise remarkable. For similar reasons the opinion of the affiant McGraw that the crime was committed at or near the place where the body was found, which appears in his affidavit dated more than a year after the crime was committed, is of but little value. It was based on observations made by him on the morning after the crime was committed, at the place where the body was found, to which he appears to have been attracted by the mere idle curiosity of a passerby. He had at that time no reason to believe that the policeman had not been killed while on duty on his beat, and under the circumstances it is not to be supposed that he made a very careful investigation for the purpose of determining whether this was true or not. In support of his opinion he says, first, that he saw no traces of blood leading away from the scene of the crime; second, that when the body was moved the flow of coagulated blood from the wounds in the throat indicated that before that time there had been no great exterior loss of blood from these wounds, from which affiant inferred that the body had not been moved after the death wounds had been inflicted; and, finally, he says that he noticed that the grass was trampled down at a point very near the place where the body lay, in such a way that affiant came to the conclusion that the deceased and his aggressors had had a struggle there. We have already stated that in our opinion, negative testimony as to the presence of a trail of blood leading to the place where the body was found, submitted by witnesses who made their observations at a time when they had no reason to suspect that the deceased did not come to his death at the place where his body was found, is of but little probative value; and it is worthy of observation that if this affiant’s inexpert and unscientific opinion that the deceased had not suffered a heavy exterior loss of blood before he was abandoned at the place where his body was found is correct, this fact would in itself partially account for the failure of the different affiants to notice a trail of blood leading to the house of Arcangel, where the crime was committed. As to the trampled-down grass, it is to be remembered that from his own statement it appears that affiant was not the first person on the scene of the crime, and that the evidence discloses that a number of persons had preceded him in examining the body where it lay, so that the condition of the grass which he undertakes to recall and describe in his affidavit, may well have been the result of the presence of these onlookers, or it may have been caused by those who carried the dead body of the deceased as they stood for a moment preparatory to laying or throwing it on the ground. And whatever be the correct explanation of the alleged facts set out in the statement of this affiant, as distinguished from his opinion which was formed originally under conditions which render it improbable that such opinion could afford a safe guide even were it admissible as evidence, we do not think that these facts are necessarily in conflict with the material facts developed by the witnesses for the prosecution at the trial. The statement of Juliana Gutierrez that she saw the defendant Pablo Raymundo being maltreated by a police officer for the purpose of compelling him to make the confession of his guilt which was offered in evidence at the trial is entitled to but scant consideration in ruling upon this motion for a new trial. If her testimony at the trial was true, nothing contained in her affidavit is worthy of credence; and if, as she alleges, all her evidence at the trial was false, no new fact set out in her affidavit can be taken as proven upon the testimony of such a witness. The fact alleged in the particular statement under consideration was contradicted and denied by the various witnesses who were present when Raymundo’s confession and admissions were taken, and the trial court after hearing these witnesses testify and upon mature consideration of the testimony of Raymundo himself, held that they were made “voluntarily and without compulsion or inducement;”, and in our opinion this finding is fully sustained by the evidence of record. We are not unaware of the possibility and even probability that an overzealous police officer may at times succumb to the temptation to use undue methods in extorting confessions and admissions from persons suspected of the commission of grave offenses, and we are fully alive to the necessity for the most painstaking scrutiny in weighing evidence relating to alleged voluntary confessions made to police officers; but the evidence as to the voluntary character of the confessions and admissions made by this defendant is so conclusive that it can not be put in doubt by an affidavit such as that submitted by Juliana Gutierrez, and indeed the detailed and specific character of the confession and admissions under consideration tends strongly to negative the suggestion that they were extorted by the use of physical violence, and it is hardly credible that such a confession of such a crime could be extorted involuntarily from an accused person by the use of such methods as those described by this affiant. For reasons indicated at the outset of this opinion, and in view of what has just been said, we do not deem it necessary to dwell on the cumulative quality of the alleged newly discovered evidence set out in this particular statement of the witness Juliana Gutierrez—which under a strict application of the rules governing the granting of new trials, would, perhaps, in itself afford a sufficient ground for refusing to take her statement in this regard into consideration upon this motion. But the sworn retraction by this affiant of all her material testimony given at the trial presents a more serious question, which must be examined and decided from a wholly different standpoint from that adopted in dealing with the statements contained in the affidavits already considered; since if her retraction be accepted as genuine and true, it discloses the existence of newly discovered evidence which would justify and require the reopening of the cases now on appeal, and in all human probability the acquittal of one of the appellants upon whom the court below imposed a long term of imprisonment, and perhaps the acquittal of the two appellants upon whom capital sentences were imposed. This affiant, Juliana Gutierrez, was the principal witness for the prosecution, and the only eyewitness of the commission of the crime of which appellants were convicted. When first examined by the police, a few days after the crime had been committed, she denied all knowledge of its commission, but upon further examination at the police station and upon learning that the defendants had been arrested, she broke down, and told the whole story of the crime, substantially as she afterwards told it on the witness stand. Later, on the preliminary investigation held by the prosecuting attorney of the city of Manila, she told, under oath, substantially the same story, except that on that occasion she said that the crime was committed on the road in front of and not inside the defendant Arcangel’s house, and that Arcangel took no direct part in the commission of the crime. And, now, she declares, under oath, that the whole story was false; and her affidavit, if it could be believed, would tend very strongly to prove that none of the defendants had any part in the commission of the crime. Counsel for movents, with no small show of reason, urge that the judgment of the court below, based as it is, in large part, on the testimony of this witness, should not be affirmed; and that the records of the various cases against the appellants should be returned to the Court of First Instance, and new trials granted. After a careful review of the whole record, however, we are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the statements made in affiant’s retraction are false; that her testimony given in the Court of First Instance was true; and that appellants were properly and justly, convicted upon that testimony, taken together with the other evidence in the record. At the time when the crime was committed this witness was an ignorant servant girl some 16 years of age. Due to the fact that the defendants were each given a separate trial, she was compelled to tell her story over and over again in open court, on not less than four separate occasions. On each occasion she was subjected to a searching cross-examination by different counsel for the various defendants, some of whom were of her own race and some American. After having told her story on the witness stand, she was taken to the scene of the crime to which the court adjourned, and there again examined and reexamined. In the very nature of the story she told, it could not be developed and was not developed by categorical answers to specific questions, and necessitated the relation by her of a long.series of closely connected incidents, so that her testimony in the record occupies nearly one hundred pages of typewritten matter. Throughout the entire proceedings, the trial judge was fully cognizant of the fact that upon the testimony of this witness depended, or appeared to depend the lives of one or more of the accused. He also knew that her story as told at the trial was not altogether in accord with that told at the preliminary investigation; indeed she admitted that fact when she first went on the witness stand, and explained that she had attempted in her statements made before the trial to shield Arcangel, in whose house she lived, and who had threatened to kill her or have her killed if she implicated him. And, yet, the learned and experienced judge who saw and heard her testify, with such exceptional opportunities to form a just estimate of her qualifications and credibility as a witness, was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the truth of the story told by her on the witness stand. In his decision, the trial judge says that he found no substantial contradictions, in the dramatic account of the incidents of the night in question as related by her, and that he was satisfied that her story was in nowise shaken by the severe cross examinations to which she was subjected; and our examination of the whole record fully sustains his conclusions in this regard, for a careful review of all her testimony given at the various trials in the court below discloses no discrepancies or inconsistencies which tend in the slightest degree to weaken our faith in the genuineness and sincerity of the story told by her on the witness stand. Under all the circumstances, we can not and do not believe that if her account of the crime were false in every material detail as she now alleges, and if her story had been prepared for her as she now pretends, she could have withstood such a series of examinations and cross-examinations without involving herself in some fatal contradiction, and without betraying herself at some time or other to the trained eyes of the judge before whom she testified. Such a feat would be remarkable on the part of a man of mature mind, with large experience in the proceedings in American courts of justice; it is a well-nigh impossible one on the part of an ignorant servant girl but 16 or 17 years of age. Moreover, as stated in our decision on the merits, her story was corroborated in a number of important details by other evidence of record, and what is not less worthy of observation, it was not successfully contradicted or put in doubt by anything which developed at the trial, either in the testimony of the other witnesses, or by the admitted facts of the case as they appear in the record or as they were disclosed on the view of the scene of the crime by the trial judge; and the extrajudicial confessions and admissions of Raymundo and Arcangel fully and conclusively corroborated every essential detail of the account of the commission of the crime as related by her, and give the lie to her retraction of her testimony submitted with this motion. Furthermore, an examination of the circumstances under which her various statements were made, and of the alleged motives which actuated her in making them, tends strongly to confirm our belief in the truth of her testimony given at the trial and the falsity of her retraction set out in her affidavit. By her affidavit, she would now have us believe that a police officer, Captain Crame, in his anxiety to secure the conviction of the defendants, induced or rather forced her to testify as she did, by speaking harshly to her, and by the use of violence and maltreatment which she states went to the extent of slapping her on the cheek or side of her head with his hand. It appears thai from the time when she had this alleged interview with Captain Crame until after the trial, she lived in one of the convents of this city, and that during that time she was brought before the prosecuting attorney of the city in the course of the preliminary investigation held by that officer. Ignorant, as she undoubtedly was, it is difficult to believe that her interview with the police officer and the alleged violence of his behavior on that occasion could have so dominated and controlled her will that neither in the seclusion of the convent, nor in the prosecuting attorney’s office, nor in the trial court does she appear to have made any complaint, nor told anyone what had happened, although she must have known that her testimony given at the trial would in all probability result in bringing to the gallows her friend and relative in whose house she had lived, and perhaps her three other personal friends one or two of whom were her admirers or lovers. On the other hand her statement at the trial that the accused or their friends had threatened to kill her if she testified against them, which she made in explanation of the fact that she had asked to be committed for her own personal security to a convent, explains satisfactorily her original reticence and hesitation in giving information against the accused, and also suggests an explanation of her extraordinary conduct in submitting the affidavit retracting her testimony given at the trial. Two other witnesses in the court below, who testified to the presence of some of the accused near the scene of the crime at about the time it was committed, swore that they had been threatened with sudden death if they told what they knew, and we see no reason to doubt the statement of Juliana Gutierrez on the witness stand that she also was threatened in like manner; and keeping that fact in mind, and also keeping in mind the fact that all the accused were her former friends and associates, we are strongly convinced that the trial being ended and this poor ignorant woman having apparently passed out of the protection and guardian care of the court, she was led to make her retraction of her testimony at the trial by the exercise of some such undue influences as were undoubtedly at work in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the introduction of damaging evidence against these appellants at the trial. In conclusion, we may add, that even if it were admitted that this affiant’s retraction were sufficient to cast a doubt upon the truth of her testimony in the court below, any testimony which she might give on the reopening of the trial in the court below would be equally unworthy of belief. If her testimony given at the former trial is unworthy of credence, no new testimony which she might give on a new trial would merit the slightest consideration. The result would necessarily be that the trial judge would be compelled to decide the case on the record substantially as it stands, striking out therefrom all the testimony of this witness; and in our opinion the evidence left in the record, while it would not be sufficient to sustain the conviction of the appellant Gutierrez (who was sentenced to imprisonment), would be wholly sufficient to sustain the conviction of the appellants Raymundo and Arcangel, upon whom death sentences were imposed, their extrajudicial confessions and admissions establishing their guilt as found by the trial court beyond a reasonable doubt. And it may be well to add further, that in seeking to ascertain the truth or falsity of the statements contained in the retraction of her testimony in the court below by the affiant, Juliana Gutierrez, we have not limited ourselves to a review of the record in any one of the separate trials in the court below, partly because the motion for a new trial together with this affidavit was submitted jointly in behalf of all the appellants, but chiefly because this motion being directed to the sound discretion of the court, the question of the truth or falsity of this affiant’s retraction justifies and requires a review of the whole record before us, the fact that separate trials were granted in the court below in nowise limiting the breadth of the inquiry. Convinced as we are of the falsity of the statements contained in the retraction of her testimony by this affiant, and of the immateriality of the evidence set out in the statements of the other affiants, it is clearly our duty to deny the motion under consideration and it is so ordered. Arellano, C. J., Torres, Mapa, and Moreland, JJ., concur.