CA denies De Lima's plea vs exclusion of Ragos, convicts from prosecution
MANILA, Philippines — The Court of Appeals has denied the appeal of former Senator Leila de Lima questioning the exclusion of former Bureau of Corrections officer-in-charge Rafael Ragos and other convicts from prosecution in the drug charges she is currently facing.
In a resolution promulgated on July 20 but made public only recently, the appellate court stood by its consolidated decision dated October 28, 2021. The CA said there is no reason to justify the modification, amendment or reversal of its decision since no new matter and argument had been raised.
The court stressed that “the right to prosecute vests the public prosecutors with a wide range of discretion—the discretion of what and whom to charge, the exercise of which depends on a smorgasbord of factors that are best appreciated by the public prosecutors.”
The CA also said the prosecution had every right to seek an amendment of the information before arraignment and exclude Ragos as an accused.
“The assailed orders of the regional trial court which denied petitioner’s motion to include or reinstate Rafael Ragos as an accused were not issued with grave abuse of discretion as the assailed orders were simply in accord with the rule that the determination of who should be criminally charged in court is essentially an executive function,” the resolution read.
Ragos was earlier a co-accused of De Lima in the one of the three cases, but he was dropped from the case after he executed an additional sworn statement which detailed the sources of the money he supposedly delivered to De Lima in 2012.
In May, the former BuCor executive, turned key witness in the trial of de Lima, recanted his allegation. Confessed drug lord Kerwin Espinosa and de Lima’s former aide Ronnie Dayan also retracted their accusations against her.
The court added that the denial of De Lima’s motion to include convicts such as Herbert Colanggo as accused in the case against her does not violate the former lawmaker’s right to equal protection.
In 2018, De Lima sought to disqualify the prosecution’s witnesses in the drug case against her for being convicted of crimes with moral turpitude that, she said, goes against law on state witnesses.
“As we have stated in the assailed consolidated decision, petitioner, Colanggo et al. and Martinez et al. can hardly be considered as equals as substantial distinctions exist between them,” the resolution read.
De Lima, who has been detained since February 2017, has two pending cases. She had been acquitted in one case.
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