Republic of the Philippines

Supreme court
Manila

EN BANC
REPUBLIC OF THE G.R. No. JD11101
PHILIPPINES
Plaintiff-Appellee, Present:

-versus- BAGUIO, J

TOMAS DELA CRUZ AND MARIN, J

EDWIN DELA CRUZ,
Accused-Appelant RAFANAN, J

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DECISION

BAGUIO, J.:

“The law is reason free from passion…Man, when perfected, is the best of
animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.” -
Aristotle

May this case serve as a reminder that regardless of how abhorrent an act
may be at first blush, a deeper appreciation of its facts and as well as the legal
principle applicable would, at most times, dispel the veil of ignorance that quickly
clouds our better judgment.

Before us, for consideration, is a case of nothing but exception circumstance.

Both of the accused are charged with the murder of one Richard Dela Cruz. Both
admit to the killing and cannibalizing of the victim, however, both also interpose
the defense that they were impelled by self-preservation. The extreme necessity of
the situation had justified their reprehensible right.

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The factual antecedents are as follows as found by the Appellate Court:

“John, a Cebuano lawyer, had purchased the Layag, a fifty-two-foot

pleasure yacht, and needed a crew to sail it from the Philippines across the
Pacific to Japan. The vessel was small for the open ocean, and much could
happen between the Philippines and Japan.

Captain Tomas took the job and assembled a crew for the voyage.
Captain Tomas chose Edwin to be his first mate, and Edmund as the only
other member of the crew. For a cabin boy, Captain Tomas took on Richard,
an orphan of seventeen. Young Richard had never before left the shores of
the Philippines; but without a family to support him, he needed to learn a
trade to make a living, and so he signed on with Captain Tomas for a chance
at a better life and a bit of adventure on the high seas.

The trip proceeded without a notable event as the tiny crew guided
their vessel into the Pacific. Captain Tomas and his crew were about sixteen
hundred miles off of the South Philippine Sea, the disputed point between
China and the Philippines. Soon, they would round the area, and then it
would be a straight shot to Japan, where payment awaited them for their
services.

While the crew slept, a massive wave reared up and towered over the
small sloop. For someone watching from afar, it might have looked like a
giant fist hovering over a table, ready to pound. And pound it did. The water
crashed down on ship and crew with crushing force. The lash of the sea
punched a hole in the side of the ship. The Layag lurched violently to one
side. Water rushed in.

The Layag sagged under the weight of the waves that lapped hungrily
over its bow. The sea had come to claim it. Captain Tomas immediately
recognized that the Layag was lost. He gave the order to abandon ship.
There was no time to gather supplies.

The crew scrambled onto a tiny lifeboat only thirteen feet long. The
lifeboat had no mast and no sail and only two oars to propel it. It offered no

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shelter from the sun, the wind, or the rains. The flimsy boards that held it
together were thin and weak. The small skiff was not the ideal place to fly to
for safety, but it had one thing possessed by nothing else in the world of the
terrified crew: it was not sinking, and at that panic-filled moment, that was
all that mattered. In the rush to abandon the Layag, the crew had saved
themselves but little else. They had no water. They had no food, with the
exception of two one-pound tins of turnips. The sun beat down upon them
mercilessly, and the lifeboat offered no shade in which to take refuge from
the relentless rays.

The lifeboat kept the men above water but provided little else. For
three days, the four men rationed the turnips until their provisions were
exhausted. The meager meals did little to blunt the hunger gnawing on their
stomachs and did nothing to quench the thirst that tore at their throats. All
the while, they searched the horizon for any sign of a passing ship, their only
hope of rescue. On the fourth day, their spirits rose as they encountered a bit
of luck. A small turtle had made the mistake of swimming too close to the
skiff. The turtle’s mistake was the men’s great fortune. They captured the
turtle and nibbled away at it for a few more days, hoping that this little bit of
nourishment would preserve them until help arrived or at least until they
could find more food.

But help did not arrive. Nor did any more food. By the twelfth day of
the ordeal, every scrap of the turtle had been licked clean. Every day,
hunger, heat, and exhaustion threatened to overwhelm the men and drive
them to collapse. Thirst was the worst. The only freshwater they had was
made up of the drops of rain they could catch in their oilskin capes. Lack of
water wreaks havoc on the senses. Hallucinations are not uncommon, and
judgment is clouded. The days dragged on; and despite the crew’s best
resolve, their situation became more desperate and more hopeless. A week
wore on without food. Five days passed without water. On the eighteenth
day adrift at sea, Captain Tomas came to a grim conclusion. They were not
all going to make it. Already, the four men were on the brink of death by
dehydration. Even if the rains fell, starvation loomed not far behind. Nothing
short of immediate rescue could save them from this dark reality, but two
and a half weeks had passed without sign of ship or sail anywhere on the

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horizon. With no supplies to sustain them, the hapless crew was eyeball-to-
eyeball with death, and death wasn’t blinking.

On the eighteenth day of the ordeal, Captain Tomas and First Mate
Edwin approached Edmund, the third member of the crew, with a startling
suggestion. Not everyone had to die. If one of their number were sacrificed,
the rest could be saved—at least for a while, maybe long enough for a ship
to cross paths with their lifeboat. Edmund caught their meaning. “One of
their number” meant the boy. At a callow seventeen, Richard was by far the
youngest member of the crew. He had no experience with the sea. This had
been his first voyage. He was a cabin boy, not a sailor. He had no father and
no mother. No wife waited for him in England; no child depended on him
for support. What’s more, his health was fading the fastest among the group.
In his inexperience and desperation, Richard had made the mistake of
drinking water from the sea to slake the thirst that was driving him to
madness. As the sailors could have told him, the salt from the seawater only
hastened his dehydration and brought him that much closer to the brink.
Death would take them all, of that there was no doubt, but it would start with
the boy; on this, all three men agreed.

What difference would a few days of semiconscious, delirious life

mean to the boy? For the rest of the crew, those days could be the difference
between life and death. Edmund recoiled with horror at the radical
suggestion and refused to listen to Tomas and Edwin. No more was said
among them, and the topic was dropped. No one said anything to Richard.

The hunger and thirst continued. On the nineteenth day, Captain

Tomas could endure no more. He corralled Edwin and Edmund and, in
whispers, proposed that they should cast lots. The loser would save the
others with his own death. It was the only way. How often in life is one man
called upon to sacrifice himself for his fellows? In war, it is an everyday
occurrence, a noble duty. Necessity had driven the men into a fight for their
lives as desperate as any faced by the most beleaguered soldier.

The hour for sacrifice had come. One had to die, lest all perish. Edwin
concurred with Tomas’ grim assessment of their circumstances and saw no

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course other than the one the captain proposed. Edmund demurred. Tomas
and Edwin sympathized with Edmund’s reluctance and tried to win him
over. No one had wanted things to come to this, but here they were, on the
precipice of death, with only this slim reed upon which to hang all hope.
Edmund remained firm in his dissent.

Frustrated by Edmund’s refusal, Tomas and Edwin dropped the idea

of casting lots and turned their arguments to the boy, whose sleeping body
could be their salvation. Think of their families, argued Tomas and Edwin.
The sailors had wives and children. What would those innocents do when
their husbands and fathers who supported them were swallowed by the sea?
The boy was an orphan. Who would miss him if he failed to return? Every
death is a tragedy, but if someone had to die, whose death would matter
least? Again, no one spoke a word of this to Richard. The three men came to
no agreement that day, but Tomas warned that if no vessel were seen by the
next day, the deed would have to be done. The men returned to their watches
and waited. The next day dawned. It was July 25, the twentieth day since the
Layag sank, the tenth day the men had gone without food. No ship could be
seen anywhere in the wide expanse of ocean that was their watery prison.
The time had come, Tomas decided, to act. Once again, Tomas approached
Edwin and Edmund. The plan was outside the bounds of all morality, but
their dire situation was outside the bounds of all endurance. Survival was at
stake. Should one die or should all? Tomas needed to know where the other
men stood.

Edwin agreed to the killing. Edmund did not. Tomas told Edmund that
he might want to take a nap on the far side of the lifeboat. Edmund moved
aside and did not interfere. Tomas made his way to where Richard lay
semiconscious, near the back of the boat. Tomas towered over the boy.
Richard’s body was thin, his skin almost translucent. The boy did not move,
probably because he could not. He was utterly helpless. Tomas said a short
prayer. He prayed for forgiveness and asked that all their souls might be
saved. He withdrew his knife. He spoke to Richard. “Your time has come,”
he whispered, and found he had nothing more to say. Words were
meaningless. All that mattered was the knife. Captain Tomas slit Richard’s

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 throat, killing him. The three men fed upon Richard, the boy’s body and
blood nourishing and reviving the fading frames of his former shipmates.

Four days later, a passing vessel found the lifeboat. The three men
were alive, but just barely. The ordeal at sea was over. But the ordeal for
Tomas and Edwin was not quite done.

Tomas had killed a boy, and Edwin had concurred in the act. The two
were charged with murder. In their defense, they claimed that they were
driven to the deed by the most extreme necessity imaginable. It is beyond
dispute, they argued, that a person may lawfully kill another in self-defense
to preserve his or her own life; and in that lifeboat, in those circumstances,
their lives were in as much mortal danger as any person had ever faced. If
they had not taken the action they took, they would all be dead, including
Edmund, who took no part in the killing, and Richard, who was their
sacrificial lamb. Had they stayed their hands and let Richard die on nature’s
schedule as he was bound to do, the boy would be just as dead, the only
difference being that the three other members of the crew would have been
his companions in death. While the killing was deeply sad and regrettable,
the two men argued, the extreme necessity of the situation had justified it.
Tomas and Edwin rested their case. To the charge of murder, they claimed
some of the justifying and exempting circumstances under the Revised
Penal Code.” (Emphasis supplied)

The Court would like to take this opportunity to cast a guiding light for the
future bar and bench in order to allow them to more effectively navigate this legal
jungle that is our Revised Penal Code — for the consequences are dire for both the
accused and the aggrieved.

Art. 248 of the Revised Penal Code reads:

“Art. 248 Murder. — Any person who, not falling within the provisions of
Article 246 shall kill another, shall be guilty of murder and shall be punished
by reclusion temporal in its maximum period to death, if committed with
any of the following attendant circumstances:

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 1. With treachery, taking advantage of superior strength, with the aid of
armed men, or employing means to weaken the defense or of means
or persons to insure or afford impunity.
2. In consideration of a price, reward, or promise.
3. By means of inundation, fire, poison, explosion, shipwreck, stranding
of a vessel, derailment or assault upon a street car or locomotive, fall
of an airship, by means of motor vehicles, or with the use of any
other means involving great waste and ruin.
4. On occasion of any of the calamities enumerated in the preceding
paragraph, or of an earthquake, eruption of a volcano, destructive
cyclone, epidemic or other public calamity.
5. With evident premeditation.
6. With cruelty, by deliberately and inhumanly augmenting the
suffering of the victim, or outraging or scoffing at his person or
corpse.”

A cursory reading of the provision of the code would prove damning to the
plight of the two accused. However, it would require us to delve into the rich and
bountiful jurisprudence of our country in order to come up with a definitive
conclusion.

The sole issue before us is whether or not the two accused were justified in
the murder of the cabin boy Richard Dela Cruz, a young lad of 17 tender years.
The two accused argues that their felonious act should not be met with their
consequent imprisonment as required by our Revised Penal Code due to the
justifying and excepting circumstance attendant to the case at bar — which are: the
justifying circumstance of self-defense under Art. 11(1); the justifying
circumstance of avoid of evil under Art. 11(4); the exempting circumstance of
compulsion of irresistible force under Art. 12(5); and the exempting circumstance
of compulsion of an uncontrollable fear of an equal or greater injury under Art.
12(6). (Entirely optional)

The defenses raised are meritorious in the case at bar. The two accused are
beyond reasonable doubt found not guilty for the murder of Richard Dela Cruz.

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 The Revised Penal code is based on the classical school of thought. (People
v. Hon. Sandiganbayan, GR No. 115439-41, July 16, 1997) Under the classical
theory, the basis of criminal liability is human will. Man is essentially a moral
creature with an absolute free will to choose between good and evil. When he
commits a felonious or criminal act, the act is presumed to have been done
voluntarily, i.e. with freedom, intelligence and intent. Man, therefore, should be
adjudged or held accountable for wrongful acts so long as free will appears
unimpaired. (People v. Estrada, GR No. 130487, June 19, 2000)

In other words, the Revised Penal Code is to be guided by natural law.

However, this Court is not unmindful of Imbong v. Ochoa wherein it held that:

“To which it held that the Court does not duly recognize Natural Law as a
legal basis for upholding or invalidating a law. The only guidepost is the
Constitution.

It said that natural laws are mere thoughts and notions on inherent rights
espoused by theorists, philosophers and theologists. The jurists of the
philosophical school are interested in the law as an abstraction, rather than in
the actual law of the past or present.”

However, it goes on to say:

“It is a universally accepted principle that every human being enjoys the
right to life. Even if not formally established, the right to life, being
grounded on natural law, is inherent and, therefore, not a creation of, or
dependent upon a particular law, custom, or belief. It precedes and
transcends any authority or the laws of men.”

Further, the incongruence is muddled up some more by Republic v.

Sandiganbayan wherein it was held that that natural law is to be used sparingly
only in the most peculiar of circumstances involving rights inherent to man where
no law is applicable.

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 However, it must be understood that when the Court refers to Natural Law is
it conceived not as a “higher law” in the constitutional sense of invalidating
ordinary law but as a benchmark against which to measure positive law.

In other words, natural law must not be used, as it is, as a means to either
validate or invalidate a statute but as a means of construction in order to distill the
proper meaning of the words instilled by the statute framer’s when they decanted it
into its creation via the process of legislative mill.

Hereunder, will be a review of relevant jurisprudence which support the

proposition espoused above.

Our criminal law is of Spanish origin

In the construction or interpretation of the provisions of the RPC, the

Spanish text is controlling, because it was approved by the Philippine Legislature
in its Spanish text. (People v. Manaba, 58 Phil. 665, 668) Furthermore, Spanish
jurisprudence may also aid the court in interpreting the provisions of the penal
code. (People v. Nocum, GR No. L-482, February 25, 1947)

The Spanish penal system is based on the proportionate penal system of the
classical theory, under which the gravity of the penalty must be in proportion to the
gravity of the criminality in the mind of the offender. Therefore, it would be
incorrect to state that there is a divorce between morality and law based on our
Revised Penal Code.

The precise reason for the calibration of imposition of criminal liability

under our penal code is based upon the premise that the more reprehensible of the
criminal mind of the offender is, the stiffer the penalties should be. This is a prime
example of how Natural Law is used as a benchmark for Positive Law.

Thus, it would be remiss of this Court to rule based plainly upon the text of
the law. This plain-meaning rule or verba legis derived from the maxim, index
animi sermo est (speech is the index of intention) rests on the valid presumption
that the words employed by the legislature in a statute correctly express its intent
or will and preclude the court from construing it differently. The legislature is

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presumed to know the meaning of the words, to have used words advisedly, and to
have expressed its intent by the use of such words as are found in the statute.

However, such is not the occasion to apply the plain-meaning rule.

Ratio legis est anima. The reason of the law is the soul of the law. (Escalante v.
People, G.R. No. 218970, [June 28, 2017], 811 PHIL 769-784) In this case, the
Court would have miserably failed in fulfilling its lofty purpose if it would fall into
the common trappings of a mind not learned in the arts of statutory construction.

Classification of Crimes

There is a distinction between crimes which are mala in se, or wrongful

from their nature, such as theft, rape, homicide, murder, etc., and those that are
mala prohibita, or wrong merely because it is prohibited by statute, such as illegal
possession of firearms.

Crimes mala in se are those so serious in their effects on society as to call

for almost unanimous condemnation of its members; while crimes mala prohibita
are violation of mere rules of convenience designed to secure a more orderly
regulation of the affairs of the state. (Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, Rawle’s 3rd
Revision)

In acts mala in se, the intent governs; but in those mala prohibita, the only
inquiry is, has the law been violated?

The term mala in se refers generally to felonies defined and penalized by the
RPC. In intentional felonies, the act or omission of the offender is malicious. In the
language of Art. 3, the act is performed with deliberate intent (dolo). Dolo is
equivalent to malice. Most of the felonies defined and penalized in Book II of the
RPC are committed by means of dolo or with malice — Murder is.

Is the killing moral?

In order that an act or omission may be considered as having been performed

or incurred with deliberate intent, the following requisites must concur:

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1. He must have freedom while doing an act or omitting to do an act. When a
person acts without freedom, he is no longer a human being but a tool; his
liability is as much as that of the knife that wounds, or the torch that sets fire,
or the key that opens a door, or of the ladder that is placed against the wall of a
house in committing robbery;
2. He must have intelligence while doing the act or omitting to do an act.
Without this power, necessary to determine the morality of human acts, no
crime can exist. Thus, the imbecile or the insane, and the infant, well as the
minor and acting without discernment, have no criminal liability, because they
act without intelligence; and
3. He must have intent while doing the act or committing to do the act. (Reyes)

II

The justifying circumstance of self-defense under Art. 11(1); the justifying

circumstance of avoid of evil under Art. 11(4); the exempting circumstance of
compulsion of irresistible force under Art. 12(5); and the exempting circumstance
of compulsion of an uncontrollable fear of an equal or greater injury under Art.
12(6). (Entirely optional)

III

In dubio pro reo means “When in doubt, for the accused.” Intimately related to the
in dubio pro reo principle is the Rule of Lenity. The rule applies when the court is
faced with two possible interpretations of a penal statute — one that is prejudicial
to the accused and another that is favorable to him. The rule calls for the adoption
of an interpretation which is more lenient to the accused. (Intestate Estate of
Gonzales v. People, GR No. 181409, February 19, 2010)

IV

The elements of crime are present in this case where, according to the Revised
Penal Code:

1) That a person was killed;

2) That the accused killed him;

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3) That the killing was attended by any of the qualifying circumstances mentioned
in Art. 248; and
4) That the killing is not parricide or infanticide.

Murder is punishable by under the Revised Penal Code, the penalty imposed for
the crime of murder is reclusion perpetua (20 years and 1 day to 40 years, but still
indivisible penalty).

In the case of Regina v. Dudley v. Stephens, in order to save their own lives from
starvation, Dudley and Stephens (defendants) murdered a fellow young seaman
(Parker). They were convicted of murder. Killing an innocent life to save one's
own does not justify murder, even if it is necessary due to extreme hunger. The
need for food does not justify thefts, let alone murder. Stephens and Dudley chose
the weakest and youngest person to kill when he's no more necessary to kill than
any of the other grown men.

Parker was inclined to kill Stephens and Dudley, but temptation is not an excuse
for murder. Their unfortunate circumstances also do not lend themselves to a
lenient interpretation of the legal definition of murder.

As necessary as the circumstances appeared to be, sacrificing one's life to save the
rest does not justify murder. The fact that Dudley and Stephens chose the most
vulnerable person to be the victim does not mean Parker could not have survived.
Instead, by killing him, it ensures that he has no chance of survival.

DECISION

We hold that the course taken in the first instance was 'fair and wise,' and that it
was the only course open to be taken. Regardless of how sympathetic people are,
the Chief Justice acknowledges that no exception to the statutory provision applies.
The Chief Justice prefers to rely on possible executive clemency, which he
describes as "easing the rigors of the law," and proposes that the Supreme Court
join in the communication to the Chief Executive, expecting clemency to be
granted. Justice can be served in this manner without violating either the letter or
the spirit of the law.

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WHEREFORE, the judgment of the court below is hereby modified by sentencing
the appellant for murder to reclusion perpetua (20 years and 1 day to 40 years, but
still indivisible penalty.) 2; s

SO ORDERED.

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