G.R. No. 106875 - PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, VS. NESTOR BABOR AND SONY BABOR,* ACCUSED-.

Ruling

accordingly meted the penalty of reclusion perpetua and ordered to pay the heirs of the victim the amount of P80,000.00 by way-of actual, exemplary and moral damages, as well as the costs. [7] 1. In a reprise of their position at the trial, appellants maintain in this appeal that the killing of the victim, Evangelino Camias, was justified on account of their having respectively acted in self-defense and in defense of a relative. Unfortunately for them, the evidence on record contrarily and indubitably point to their guild in the offense charged. It is elementary that self-defense requires unlawful aggression on the part of the victim, reasonable necessity of the means employed by the accused to prevent or repel it, and lack of sufficient provocation on the part of the person defending himself. The first two requisites, unlawful aggression and reasonable necessity of the means employed to repel it, are likewise required in the justifying circumstance of defense of a relative, with the third element being that if the provocation was given by the person attacked, the one making a defense had no part therein. [8] An accused relying on said justifying circumstances must prove the same by means of sufficient, satisfactory, and convincing evidence. [9] As the burden of proof rests upon him to establish the same, he must necessarily rely on the strength of his own evidence and not upon the weakness of that of the prosecution. [10] And, where the prosecution evidence, as in the present appeal, renders extremely doubtful the veracity of the defense version, said defenses cannot be granted any evidentiary weight. In the case at bar, the forthright declarations of prosecution witness Felicidad Duhaylungsod before the trial court coupled with proof of the number of wounds that the victim sustained, sets at naught the feeble reliance of appellants on the justifying circumstances of self-defense and defense of relative. True, 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. However, the sequence of proven events which transpired thereafter effectively negates the presence or applicability of this fundamental element and of the other element of reasonable means to prevent or repel that aggression at the second stage of the fray. 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 furthe