Unjustified killing

When a legally married person surprises and kills his/her spouse in the act of committing sexual intercourse with another person or immediately thereafter, he/she shall only be sentenced to destierro or prohibited from entering the place or places designated in the sentence nor within the radius therein specified, which shall be not more than 250 and not less than 25 kilometers from the place designated. This is explained in this case of Nolan.

Nolan married Ria and the couple established their conjugal home near a strawberry plantation where Nolan used to pick strawberries for sale in the market. During the marriage they begot four children but their marital relations have not been so smooth because of frequent disputes that ended up in Barangay conciliations. Indeed Ria had not been the paragon of virtue as she has been seen on several occasions with other men.

One early morning Ria left their house and went strawberry picking at a nearby plantation together with her sister Elsa and another friend Lita. Later they went to the house of another neighbor, Bella and sat outside talking about the strawberry plantation where they had picked berries that morning.

Suddenly at about 11:30 a.m. Nolan appeared before them, then slapped Ria’s right cheek and said “Come and get what you want.” Thereupon he pulled out a knife from his pocket. The women scampered away, shouting for help. As Elsa ran, she looked back and saw Ria fell into a canal after Nolan stabbed her twice.

Elsa’s brother, Mora, who had been chopping firewood, heard the shouts of the women. So he ran towards where Elsa stood and saw Ria sprawled on her back bleeding while Nolan stood about 7 to 8 feet away. He went after Nolan but the latter escaped. So Mora just returned to pick up Ria and rushed her to a hospital where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

Meantime Nolan went to their house and sat inside the bathroom with the blood stained knife he used to stab his wife to death and an empty bottle of poison at his side. It was in this situation when the policemen responding to the report caught Nolan and charged him with the crime of parricide.

During the trial, the prosecution presented Elsa, Lita, Bella and Mora as witnesses to affirm the foregoing occurrences leading to Ria’s death. On the other hand, Nolan did not deny the killing of his wife. He merely claimed that when he arrived home at about 11 a.m. after selling strawberries in the market he found Ria and another man, whom he knew as Selmo in the master’s bedroom engaged in what seemed to him like a sexual act.

So he allegedly rushed to the kitchen to get a knife purportedly to protect himself from Selmo who looked stronger than himself. But when he returned to the bedroom Selmo had already dressed up and went out through the window and successfully escaped. He further claimed that when he returned home, Ria already ran away to Bella’s house. And when she followed to confront her about the incident, he said he got mad and slapped Ria because she revealed her plan to separate from him. And as Ria ran away she followed her to a slope where both of them rolled downhill until he noticed blood gushing out from her chest. Stunned and saddened, Nolan said that he went home and closeted himself in the bathroom where he broke down and cried until the police found him.

The lower court as affirmed by the Supreme Court (SC) still found him guilty of parricide and sentenced him to reclusion perpetua. The SC ruled that Nolan’s defense is not credible. Several witnesses testified that Ria had been with them picking strawberries all morning of that fateful day. Furthermore, even assuming that his version of the case is correct, it is clear that he did not actually kill Ria when he allegedly caught her in the act of sexual intercourse with Selmo. He rushed to the kitchen first to get a knife and when he returned Selmo already escaped. He did not likewise kill Ria immediately after he caught her in the act as he chased Selmo first and returned home only later on. Hence the killing of Ria in this case was not during the alleged sexual intercourse or immediately thereafter. It was not the proximate result of the outrage overwhelming Nolan after chancing upon his spouse in the act of infidelity (People vs. Wagas, G.R. 61704, March 8, 1989)