Case Digest (G.R. No. 9963)
Facts:
The United States, Plaintiff and Appellee, vs. Emilia Nebrida and Felix Saorda, G.R. No. 9963, November 05, 1915, the Supreme Court En Banc, Carson, J., writing for the Court.
The defendants Emilia Nebrida (female defendant) and Felix Saorda (male defendant) were convicted in the court below of the crime of adultery and each sentenced to two years, four months, and one day of prision correccional, together with the accessory penalties prescribed by law. The criminal information charged that the two lived together as man and wife and maintained illicit relations.
The complaining witness testified that he had been married to Emilia Nebrida some twenty years earlier by a Roman Catholic priest named Candido Esguerra in the municipality of Oras, Samar; that she left him about 1906 and went to the mountains with one Roman Ellang; and that thereafter she had lived with Felix Saorda, openly holding themselves out as husband and wife and maintaining illicit relations. It was not denied at trial that the appellants cohabited as man and wife; the prosecution also offered a document (apparently stolen from the woman defendant) tending to show a civil marriage between the two appellants by the Justice of the Peace of Catbalogan on February 24, 1906.
The only direct evidence offered to establish the complaining witness's alleged prior marriage to Emilia Nebrida was the complaining witness's own oral testimony. The prosecution produced no church register entry, certificate of marriage, or other contemporaneous written proof of the alleged priestly marriage, nor d...(Subscriber-Only)
Issues:
- Was the oral testimony of the complaining witness alone sufficient to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that he had been previously married to Emilia Nebrida so as to sustain convictions for...(Subscriber-Only)
Ruling:
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Ratio:
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Doctrine:
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