In their 155-page demurrer to evidence, lawyers Orlando Salatandre and Giovanni Mata argued that Ecleo's political opponents in Surigao del Norte took advantage of the indictment to avenge their defeat in the guise of seeking justice for Ecleo's wife, Alona, who was murdered in 2002.
Salatandre turned the tables instead against Alona's brother, Ben Bacolod, who the lawyer alleged as the one who orchestrated and concocted the plot to show that Ecleo killed his wife although it was Ben who did it.
Salatandre said the prosecution only used Alona's younger brother, Josebil Bacolod, to accuse Ecleo as the killer by allegedly making up a story that he saw Ecleo and former driver, Juriben Padero, loading a black garbage bag into the family's red car on the evening of January 5, 2002.
If it was true that Josebil witnessed the incident when Ecleo and Padero helped each other load the bag into the car's baggage compartment, he did not know still the contents of the bag, Salatandre said.
He said: "Assuming without admitting that the victim inside the garbage bag was Alona, the prosecution failed to establish any motive on the part of the accused to kill his wife, and the testimonies of the prosecution witnesses' materially and substantially contradicted each other."
Salatandre also claimed the prosecution had "invented" a witness, Gloria Navaja, who confessed that she saw two men standing beside a red car at the highway of barangay Coro, Dalaguete-the place where the black garbage bag that contained the woman's body was found on January 8, 2002.
The lawyer rejected Navaja's testimonies that she recognized one of the two men as Ecleo, because it was impossible for her to recall the facial description of the accused while she forgot the color of the clothes worn by the driver of the motorcycle that she rode that time.
Ecleo's lawyers have challenged the sufficiency of the evidence against their client, insisting that the prosecution has failed to establish the identity of the woman's body that was found inside the garbage bag.
Even assuming that it was Alona's body, Salatandre contended that the prosecution failed to establish the place of actual death, and to determine which court will hear the case. "Hence, the legal presumption of death at the place where the dead body was found should prevail," he said.
Salatandre also argued that there has been no physical evidence to support that Alona was killed inside her residence in barangay Banawa, and it could be in some other places.
A demurrer is a defendant's formal answer or plea denying, while attacking the legal sufficiency of, the truth of the charges against him.
After the defense's submission of the demurrer, Regional Trial Court judge Geraldine Faith Econg then ordered the prosecution to submit its comment against it, on or before June 2. - Rene U. Borromeo