People v. Henry Uy

Ruling

accordingly directed Judge Navarro to: (a) HEAR Criminal Case No. 95227-R entitled People vs. Henry Uy with utmost dispatch; (b) STRICTLY COMPLY with the amendment to Sec. 5, Rule 110 of the Revised Rules of Criminal Procedure as contained in the En Banc Resolution dated April 10, 2002 of this Court in A.M. No. 02-2-07-SC; and (c) EXPLAIN within thirty (30) days from notice why he failed to and continues to fail to submit: (1) his monthly certificate of service since the date of his assumption to duty up to the present; (2) his semestral inventory of cases for January to June 2001 and July to December 2001; and (3) his monthly report of cases for January, February and March 2002. Then, on 27 May 2003, the OCA again received another letter [9] from Ristig, this time informing that Judge Navarro had not yet resolved Criminal Case No. 95227-R despite the earlier directive of this Court. On 26 September 2003, the OCA received from Judge Navarro a Manifestation [10] dated 28 April 2003. Therein, Judge Navarro stated that he had already decided Criminal Case No. 95227-R on 28 April 2003 without the stenographic notes having been transcribed and without receiving the evidence of the accused, as circumstances seem to have conspired to cause further delay in the proceedings , copy of which decision [11] is attached to said Manifestation . In the same Manifestation , the judge further explained that the resolution of Criminal Case No. 95227-R was delayed due to the failure of the private prosecutor to make a formal offer of exhibits despite his directive to do so, and that he discovered later that his former court interpreter had mishandled the prosecutions Formal Offer of Exhibits. As regards this Courts directive to strictly comply with the amendment to Section 5, Rule 110 of the Rules of Court, Judge Navarro manifested that he had prepared a pro-forma order for the purpose and had been openly calling on private prosecutors to obtain the necessary authorization in line with the said amendment, but that there had been surprisingly only few takers. In the matter of the delay in the submission of the Semestral Inventory and Monthly Report of Cases, Judge Navarro attributed the same to his former clerk of court who had resisted his efforts to put these in order. He alleged that his new clerk of court, Atty. Joje Zamora-Decal, discovered that 1,334 cases had been concealed from him and were not included in the initial inventory of cases, which explains why his courts Monthly Report of Cases for December 2001 [12] showed a total caseload of only 2,322 cases while that of January 2002 [13] reflected a total of 3,656 cases. Anent his monthly certificates of service, Judge Navarro offered the following explanations in his Manifestation : The undersigned has already submitted his complete monthly certificates of service. He was simply deathly afraid to submit them earlier from assumption of service as he had become aware that with the passage of the S