People vs. Babor GR No.

106875
(Art. 11, Justifying Circumstance)
FACTS:

Evangelino Camias arrived at the house of Sps. Nestor and Sony Babor and asked for tuba. Sony, who
was attending to their new-born their supply run out. She took this occasion to collect Sony’s unpaid debt.
Without warning, Camias crept toward Sony and began to sexually assault her. Sony managed to escape
after biting him on the hand. Camias chased her and unsheathed his bolo, aimed a hacking blow at Sony
and hit her in the upper right hand. At this point Nestor arrived and saw his wife bleeding. Nestor shouted
for help which awoken Felicidad Duhaylungsod who was asleep in her home.

She instinctively peered out from the window and from there, at an approximate distance of 20 meters,
she saw Nestor and his wife, both armed with bolos, were chasing a fleeing and blooded Camias. Then
she saw Sony lunged herself at Camias and hacked her three times in the different parts of his body while
Nestor delivered the fatal blow by stabbing him in the chest.

Autopsy reported revealed that Camias suffered ten wounds and one even resulted in completely
severing his right arm. On trial, the spouses invoked self-defense arguing that Nestor acted in self-
defense and defense of his family while Sony could not have attacked Camias because she was injured.

ISSUE:

Whether or not the invocation of self-defense is tenable.

RULING:

NO, the invocation of self defense is untenable.

The rule is that when an unlawful aggression no longer exists, the one making the defense has
no more right to kill or even wound the former aggressor.

In this case, there may initially have been unlawful aggression by the victim when he attempted to
rape Sony Babor and, failing therein, he vented his ire on a surprised Nestor Babor by attacking the latter.
It clearly appears from the evidence that after the spouses had turned the tide against the deceased, with
the latter already wounded and defensively scrambling away from the house of the Babors, both
appellants still pursued Camias. As soon as Sony Babor caught up with him near the residence of
Felicidad Duhaylungsod, she hacked the victim thrice, after which Nestor Babor stabbed him on the
chest. This was exactly the scene which Felicidad Duhaylungsod witnessed. It is therefore apparent that
the deceased was then no longer the aggressor but that he was actually attempting to escape from
further harm at the hands of the spouses.|||