The Quezon City regional trial court (RTC) Branch 104 dismissed a criminal case filed against a school teacher for uploading a video of a police officer saying Vice President Sara Duterte’s convoy had caused a traffic congestion on Commonwealth Avenue.
In a four-page decision, the RTC cleared teacher Janus Munar, who was accused of violating Article 154, paragraph 1 that “contemplates a situation where the publication itself is the source of the endangerment to public order, not just a fuel to the fire.”
The court said the complainant, Executive Master Sgt. Verdo Pantollano, failed to convince the lower court of his argument, citing “the amended information still suffers from the same infirmities as the original information.”
Pantollano’s amended complaint was still defective, according to the court. “In this case, there is nothing in the [criminal] information, which states that the accused published the video ‘as news,'” the decision stated.
The amended information used the phrase “further propagate,” which it said “suggests that it was the traffic incident which disturbed the public order and that the accused’s act of uploading the video simply aggravated the disturbance,” the court said.
The video in question was uploaded in October last year, which went viral on social media, accusing the Vice President of allegedly receiving VIP treatment resulting in a traffic jam from Quezon City police, which was patroling Commonwealth Avenue.
