ACT Teachers party-list Representative France Castro has filed a petition for review with the Office of the Justice Secretary, seeking the reversal of a local prosecutor’s resolution on January 9, 2024, which dismissed grave threat charges against former president Rodrigo Duterte.
In her petition, Castro asserted that the criminal complaint contains all the elements of the crime of grave threats, and noted the city prosecutor’s mistake in disregarding the electronic evidence she presented to support her complaint.
“There is nothing in the Rules that provides for an ‘authentication or certification’ from social media platforms or from the television network where the electronic document is taken,” the petition read.
“The Office of City Prosecutor committed grave abuse of discretion when it declined to attribute due evidentiary value to the complainant’s sworn statement that she personally watched, downloaded, and saved the video footages containing Respondent-Appellee’s threatening remarks, ” it added.
Lawyers from the Movement Against Disinformation led by Dean Tony La Viña and Atty. Rico Domingo are representing Castro.
Recently, the Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office has dropped the grave threats charges leveled against Duterte by Castro.
In a 14-page resolution, Senior Assistant City Prosecutor Ulric Badiola said that the requisites of the offense grave threats were not been adequately established in the complaint.
“… this office finds the evidence insufficient to indict the respondent for grave threats inasmuch as the requisite elements for the crimes appears to have not been sufficiently and concretely established contrary to what the complainant wanted to impress upon this office,” Badiola’s resolution read.
It added that the way the respondent, Mr. Duterte, uttered or stated the threatening remarks did not convincingly established that he was serious in carrying it out.
“If the intention of the respondent was really to intimidate and to take seriously such threatening remarks..he would not have taken so much prologues and would have just directly and immediately pronounced the threats conceived in his mind,” the resolution read.
Also, the prosecutor noted that Duterte uttered the supposedly threatening remarks at the height of the issue concerning the confidential funds, the “respondent would naturally be disappointed and come to the defense of his daughter amid such political issues.”
“ in fact, it would appear that the respondent’s heightened emotions when he uttered the alleged threatening remarks were seemingly triggered by such issues due to the various politically motivated attacks against her daughter,” the resolution said.
