Cebu City fiscal gets reprieve from CA

CEBU CITY — A controversial assistant city prosecutor here has won a reprieve when the Court of Appeals (CA) temporarily restrained the Office of the Ombudsman and the city’s chief prosecutor from implementing her three-month suspension.

The appellate court’s order came two days after Mary Ann Castro filed an amended petition for certiorari that added the city’s chief prosecutor, Jose Pedrosa, to Deputy Ombudsman for the Visayas Primo Miro and director Virginia Palanca-Santiago as respondents in an earlier petition.

The CA’s 8th Special Division, chaired by Conrado Vasquez Jr., issued the order, which gave the respondents 10 days to reply, Castro said.

Castro had claimed that the Ombudsman erred in its order suspending her for simple misconduct.

Her counsel, Adelino Sitoy, said he would advise his client to report back to work on Monday and to have the cases she had been handling given back to her even if these had reportedly been assigned to another prosecutor.

The Ombudsman suspended Castro for three months without pay for allegedly receiving money from one of the lawyers of suspected Hong Kong triad member Giovanni Gimenez whose cases she was handling. — Freeman News Service