EN BANC
G.R. No. L-31012 August 15, 1973
THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, plaintiff-appellee,
vs.
ARTURO CARANDANG, MARIO BUISER, MONTANO CARAAN and DIOMEDES ESTRELLA, defendants-appellants.
Office of the Solicitor General Felix Q. Antonio, Acting Assistant Solicitor, General Ricardo L. Pronove, Jr. and Solicitor Tomas M. Dilig for plaintiff-appellee.
Pastor B. Timog for defendant-appellant Arturo Carandang.
Magno T. Bueser for defendants-appellants Mario Buiser, et al.
Separate Opinions
CASTRO, J., dissenting:
The information indicting the appellants Arturo Carandang and Diomedes Estrella, together with two others, recites as follows:
The undersigned City Fiscal accuses Arturo Carandang, Montano Caraan. Diomedes Estrella and Mario Buiser, of the crime of robbery with rape, committed as follows:
That on or about November 28, 1969, in the City of San Pablo, Republic of the Philippines and within the jurisdiction of the Honorable Court, the accused above-named conspiring, confederating and mutually helping one another, armed with deadly weapons, to wit: firearms with intent of gain and against the consent of the owners by means of violence and intimidation against persons, did then and there willfully, unlawfully and feloniously take from Eugenio Gutierrez and Socorro Familiar, the following articles with their corresponding value, to wit:
| Cash | P130.00 |
| Radio | 280.00 |
| Watch | 70.00 |
| Ring | 200.00 |
|
P680.00
|
to the damage and prejudice of the said spouses in the total sum of P680.00; that on the occasion of the said robbery and in pursuance of their conspiracy, the accused Arturo Carandang and Diomedes Estrella, willfully and unlawfully and feloniously, by means of force and intimidation, did then and there have carnal knowledge of Socorro Familiar against her will and in her house.
It is needless to restate in full the findings of fact arrived at by the Court. In sum, the two appellants Carandang and Estrella, shortly after robbing the house of the complainant spouses Eugenio Gutierrez and Socorro Familiar, committed, at gunpoint, the crime of rape upon the person of Socorro.
At the threshold, I deem it essential, for the purposes of this separate opinion, that the pertinent provisions of the Revised Penal Code are restated in their exact phraseology.
Article 48 gives two — and only two — conceptual meanings of what is known in our penal law as a "complex crime," each of which calls for the imposition of the penalty for the more or most serious crime in its maximum period. The said article reads as follows:
ART. 48. Penalty of complex crimes. — When a single act constitutes two or more grave or less grave felonies or when an offense is a necessary means for committing the other, the penalty for the most serious crime shall be imposed, the same to be applied in its maximum period.
Article 294, par. 2 (under Title Ten, entitled "Crimes Against Property") provides as follows:
ART. 294. Robbery with violence against, or intimidation of persons. — Penalties. — Any person guilty of robbery with the use of violence against, or intimidation of any person shall suffer:
x x x x x x x x x
2 . The penalty of reclusion temporal in its medium period to reclusion perpetua, when the robbery shall have been accompanied by rape or intentional mutilation, or if by reason or on occasion of such robbery, any of the physical injuries penalized in subdivision 1 of article 263 shall have been inflicted.
Article 335 (under Title Eleven, entitled "Crimes Against Chastity") defines and punishes the offense of rape, as follows:
ART. 335. When and how rape committed. — Rape is committed by having carnal knowledge of a woman under any of the following circumstances:
1. By using force or intimidation;
2. When the woman is deprived of reason or otherwise unconscious; and
3. When the woman is under twelve years of age, even though neither of the circumstances mentioned in the two next preceding paragraphs shall be present.
The crime of rape shall be punished by reclusion perpetua.
Whenever the crime of rape is committed with the use deadly weapon or by two or more persons, the penalty shall be reclusion perpetua to death.
When by reason or on the occasion of the rape, the victim has become insane, the penalty shall be death.
When the rape is attempted or frustrated and a homicide is committed by reason or on the occasion thereof, the penalty shall be likewise death.
When by reason or on the occasion of the rape, a homicide is committed, the penalty shall be death. (as amended by Rep. Act 4111).
Construing articles 48, 294 (par. 2) and 335 in application to the undisputed facts obtaining in the case at bar, some members 1 of the Court seek to introduce into the corpus of our jurisprudence two conflicting and also completely strange (albeit tantalizing) doctrines, namely: first, the offense of robbery accompanied by rape (penalized by par. 2 of article 294) and the crime of rape (penalized by article 335) are a "complex crime" within the meaning and intendment of article 48; and/or, second, the offense of robbery accompanied by rape cases as such to be a punishable offense if the rape is one of the categories described and punished by the last four paragraphs of article 335 (which crime of rape, for the purpose of this opinion, I will term "qualified rape.")
I wish I could say that I find it difficult to agree. The fact is that I regard these two suggested doctrines as heresy a therefore abhorrent. The temptation to resort to short-cuts always looms large when one confronts a perplexing, if not bewildering, problem of statutory construction. But it is precisely in the area of legal hermeneutics, more than in any other area of legal learning, that one must observe utmost care to avoid the pitfalls of hasty rationalization.
What some members of the Court have thus achieve is not mere legislation in the interstices; they have in point of fact exercised legislative power (with all its panoply) — something that by no conceivable manner can be justified as falling within the periphery of the constitutional warrant vouchsafed to the Court.
1. Article 48 unambiguously states that a "complex crime" results (1) "when a single act constitutes two or more grave or less grave felonies," or (2) "when an offense is a necessary means for committing the other." Conceptually, the acts committed by each of the two appellants constitute the offense of robbery accompanied by rape, as this is defined and punished by par. 2 of article 294. It does not require mastery of logic to realize that the crime of robbery accompanied by rape cannot fall within any of the two conceptual meanings stated in article 48. Robbery (a crime against property) and rape (a crime against chastity) are two distinct and separate acts, and are not and — by their very intrinsic natures — can never be the product of one single act. And, obviously, robbery cannot be considered a necessary means of committing rape, nor vice versa.
The most serious flaw that plagues the dissenting opinion is that the act of rape in the crime of robbery accompanied by rape which is the self-same act of rape sought to be punished under article 335 is made to complex itself — and this is resorted to, quite clearly, in order to bring forcibly (although erroneously) into application the last clause of article 48 which reads, "the penalty for the most serious crime shall be imposed, the same to be applied in its maximum period." Worse yet, the conclusion conveyed is that the offense of robbery accompanied by rape (article 294, par. 2) and the offense of rape (article 335) resulted from the same act, or that one was a necessary means of committing the other. The fallacies are too glaring to require elaboration.
In my nearly seventeen years of judicial experience and legal reading, I have not come across, nor has my attention been called to, any instance in the jurisprudence of Spain and of the Philippines (or of any other country, for that matter), where the crime of robbery accompanied by rape and the separate, distinct offense of rape were held to be a "complex crime" within the meaning and intendment of article 48 or some such similar provision of law.
Napolis vs. Court of Appeals (43 SCRA 301), invoked by analogy in the dissenting opinion, is inapropos and inapposite, because of the wide disparity between the facts in that case and the facts obtaining in the case at bar. The decision in Napolis can be sustained as correct within the context of that case; but to apply Napolis to the case at bar is unwarranted. Napolis involved the crime of robbery committed by a band in an inhabited house with the use of violence against and intimidation upon persons; it had absolutely nothing to do with the crime of rape.
Conventional wisdom teaches me that the process of reasoning by analogy, unless explicitly authorized by the language of the particular penal statute under consideration,2is anathema because antithetical to the general philosophy underlying the correct and proper interpretation and enforcement of penal laws.
2. I fail to understand the reason for the statement in the dissenting opinion that the two accused should be held guilty only of the crime of qualified rape, without any mention of the robbery committed by them, since it is indubitable from the information by virtue of which they were tried that the crime imputed to them — and the findings of fact conclusively demonstrate that the offense committed by them — is robbery accompanied by qualified rape.
The information in the case at bar clearly and in no uncertain terms indicts Carandang and Estrella of the crime of robbery accompanied by rape.ℒαwρhi৷ To say that the two are guilty only of the crime of qualified rape is in effect to hold that the crime of qualified rape was not committed on the occasion of the robbery, or that the crime of robbery disappeared in both the legal and physical sense because of the supervening commission of the qualified rape, or that the information does not mean what it says. The rationalization in the dissenting opinion — which impresses me as too facile, too expedient, and devoid of reasonable legal or philosophical basis — I reject.
3. Where robbery accompanied by qualified rape is committed, the primordial question that inescapably presents itself for resolution is: What is the imposable penalty?
It is a cardinal mandate of legal exegesis that a court should endeavor to reconcile two apparently conflicting provisions of the same statute, and that only when the two are indubitably and absolutely repugnant to each other may a court, in the absence of an express repeal, be justified in ruling that the two provisions must yield to the other.
In the case at bar, this function weighs heavily, in view of the omission by Congress (due to negligence, or the utter absence of conscientious legislative study and deliberation, or some other cause) of not amending par. 2 of article 294 in order to raise the penalty provided therein for the offense of robbery accompanied by rape to harmonize with the corresponding increase in penalties for rape provided by the amendatory Republic Act 4111.
I agree that when the robbery is accompanied by rape, it is irrational, in view of the increase in the penalties for the different categories of rape, to insist that the penalty prescribed by par. 2 of article 294 for the crime of robbery with rape, which is only reclusion temporal in its medium period to reclusion perpetua, must be imposed, for the simple reason that the crime of rape has become, by a twist of legislative policy declaration, a graver offense than the crime of robbery accompanied by rape as punished by par. 2 of article 294.
It is my view that when robbery is accompanied by rape, more logical and acceptable legal interpretative result is that the offense committed is still denominated robbery accompanied by rape (the term "rape" as used in par. 2 of article 294 is generic and includes simple rape and qualified rape), but the imposable penalty should be that provided in the proper applicable paragraph of article 335.
In other words, the penalty of reclusion temporal in its medium period to reclusion perpetua prescribed by par. 2 of article 294 for the crime of robbery accompanied by rape be must be deemed to have been supplanted by the respective penalties provided in article 335, but the self-same penalty is preserved for the crime of robbery accompanied by intentional mutilation, as well as for the crime of robbery when by reason or on the occasion thereof any of the physical injuries penalized in subdivision 1 of article 263 shall have been inflicted.
Only thus, and in no other way, can these two provisions of law be harmonized.3 Article 48 has no bearing or pertinence, nor can it be brought into play by the process of analogy — which process is, in the case at bar, erroneous methodology.
4. Upon the foregoing disquisition, the following conclusions are ineluctable:
(1) The concept of the offense of robbery accompanied by rape is preserved in par. 2 of article 294 of the Revised Penal Code;
(2) Within the meaning and intendment of article 48, the crime of robbery accompanied by rape (par. 2 of article 294) never be complexed with the offense of rape (article 335) any purpose whatsoever or in whatever situation;
(3) The penalty provided by par. 2 of article 294 for the offense of robbery accompanied by rape, which is reclusion temporal in its medium period to reclusion perpetua, has been supplanted by necessary and unavoidable implication by the applicable penalties prescribed in article 335, as amended by Republic Act 4111;
(4) Where the robbery is accompanied by simple rape, the penalty shall be reclusion perpetua; and
(5) Where the robbery is accompanied by qualified rape of any of the categories described in the last four paragraphs of article 335, the imposable penalty shall be that prescribe by the applicable paragraph of the said article.
Makalintal, Actg. C.J., concurs.
Footnotes
1 Justice Claudio Teehankee's concurring and dissenting opinion is concurred by Justices Antonio P. Barredo, Felix V. Makasiar and Salvador V. Esguerra.
2 Eg.: par. 10 of article 13 of the Revised Penal Code which provides as follows: "Mitigating circumstances. — The following are mitigating circumstances: ... 10. And, finally, any other circumstances of a similar nature and analogous to those above mentioned."
3 C.f. article 297 of the Revised Penal Code which specifically provides that "When by reason or on occasion of an attempted or frustrated robbery a homicide is committed, the person guilty of such offenses shall be punished by reclusion temporal in its maximum period to reclusion perpetua, unless the homicide committed shall deserve a higher penalty under the provisions of this Code." This article, to my mind, perfectly demonstrates that in a case of legislative awareness that an undue discrepancy in penal sanctions might arise as a result of the concurrence of two otherwise separately punishable felonies, the option is for the imposition of whichever penalty prescribed for any of the concurring crimes is higher.
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