Title
Celestial vs. People
Case
G.R. No. 214865
Decision Date
Aug 19, 2015
Employee convicted of qualified theft for falsifying withdrawal slips, pocketing excess funds; appeal dismissed due to counsel's negligence; penalty modified to reclusion perpetua, capped at 40 years.
qualified theft
falsification of commercial documents
negligence of counsel
A

Case Summary (G.R. No. 214865)

Factual Background

Petitioner was employed by Glory Philippines as its accounting-in-charge and handled the company’s bank transactions and ledgers. The company’s president, Akihiro Harada, testified that petitioner prepared withdrawal slips for purported company expenses, obtained his signature, and later altered the original signed slips to increase withdrawal amounts. Petitioner then withdrew the excess amounts and retained the duplicate original of the slip. Discrepancies between photocopied slips and actual bank withdrawals led to discovery of the alleged thefts. The records reflect six withdrawals with discrepancies of USD 10,000; USD 5,000; USD 8,000; USD 10,000; USD 3,000; and USD 15,000 respectively.

Trial Court Proceedings

Glory Philippines filed criminal complaints and the Assistant Provincial Prosecutor found probable cause, resulting in six Informations for qualified theft through falsification of commercial documents filed in the RTC, Cavite City, docketed as Criminal Case Nos. 94-07 to 99-07. By Decision dated June 25, 2013, the RTC found petitioner guilty beyond reasonable doubt of six counts of qualified theft through falsification of commercial documents and sentenced her to imprisonment of twenty years of reclusion temporal for each count.

Appeal to the Court of Appeals and its Resolutions

Petitioner appealed to the Court of Appeals. The CA directed petitioner to file an appellant’s brief within thirty days pursuant to its Notice dated November 20, 2013. Petitioner’s counsel, Atty. Bernard Paredes, sought a thirty-day extension to January 26, 2014 and later informed petitioner he requested a further extension until February 26, 2014. The CA issued a Resolution dated April 28, 2014, which, after verifying nonfiling of the brief despite extensions, considered the appeal abandoned and dismissed it pursuant to Section 8, Rule 124. The CA later issued a Resolution dated July 17, 2014 entering judgment, and on August 6, 2014 petitioner received a copy of that July 17, 2014 Resolution. Petitioner filed an Omnibus Motion on August 22, 2014 seeking reconsideration and leave to admit a belated appellant’s brief; the CA denied the motion by Resolution dated October 10, 2014.

Petitioner’s Contentions

Petitioner argued that she did not personally receive the April 28, 2014 CA Resolution and that her failure to file the appellant’s brief resulted from the gross and inexcusably negligent conduct of her counsel. She urged that her right to appeal should not be lost because the negligence of counsel should not bind her and that substantial justice required reopening the appeal to allow ventilation of meritorious grounds that would affect her life and liberty.

Respondent’s Contentions

The Office of the Solicitor General, representing the People of the Philippines, maintained that the right to appeal is a statutory privilege subject to procedural requirements and that the CA properly dismissed the appeal under Section 8, Rule 124 for failure to prosecute. The OSG further invoked the immutability of judgments, asserting that the dismissal had attained finality and could not be recalled.

Issue Presented

The dispositive issue was whether the Court of Appeals erred in dismissing petitioner’s appeal for failure to file an appellant’s brief despite the extensions granted, and whether petitioner may be relieved of the consequences of her counsel’s negligence so that her appeal may be heard on its merits.

Supreme Court’s Disposition

The Supreme Court denied the petition for lack of merit and held that the CA did not err in dismissing the appeal for abandonment. The Court, however, lifted the CA’s Entry of Judgment and modified the penalty imposed by the RTC. The RTC’s conviction and finding of guilt were affirmed, but the Court modified the sentence to six penalties of reclusion perpetua with the accessory penalties under Article 40 of the Revised Penal Code and applied Article 70 to limit the total duration of imprisonment to a period not exceeding forty years.

Legal Reasoning on the Appeal Dismissal

The Court reasoned that notice to counsel constitutes notice to the client and found that the CA complied with Section 8, Rule 124 when it dismissed the appeal after the appellant and counsel failed to file the required brief despite extensions. The Court reiterated the settled doctrine that the negligence of counsel binds the client, particularly where counsel’s acts are within the scope of his authority. The Court found both counsel and petitioner negligent: counsel failed to file the brief despite two thirty-day extensions, and petitioner admitted that counsel informed her of the February 26, 2014 deadline yet she took no action to ensure compliance or to follow up after the deadline. Given these circumstances, the Court concluded that the failure to file the brief was inexcusable and that the CA acted within its discretion in dismissing the appeal.

Determination and Modification of the Penalty

Although the petition was denied, the Court applied substantive-justice considerations to modify the penalty. The Court followed the method discussed in People v. Mercado to determine the proper penalty: it converted the dollar amounts to pesos using the June and July 2006 exchange rates as reflected in the record, identified the base penalty under Article 309(1) for amounts exceeding P22,000, computed additional years per excess P10,000, applied the statutory cap of twenty years for simple theft under

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