The Supreme Court (SC) has condemned the rape-slay of a six-year-old girl in Olongapo City in 1998 as it affirmed the two life imprisonments imposed on each of the two persons as principals and a 14-year prison term on an accomplice.

Affirmed were the two life terms imposed on Norberto D. Chiong and Luciano G. Bohol, who together with accomplice Jessie M. Maliao, were ordered to pay P900,000 in civil indemnity and damages in a decision written by Senior Justice Leonardo A. Quisumbing.

The body of the victim was found by the police in a vacant lot near her house on March 18, 1998. Based on cartographic sketch, the police arrested Maliao.

On interrogation, Maliao confessed that Chiong and Bohol took turns in raping the girl inside his house. He said Chiong picked up a wooden stool and hit the girl in the chest and head. Thereafter, he said, Chiong and Bohol carried the body of the girl out of his house.

Maliao also said that he wiped the bloodstains on the floor of his room using the girl’s shirt and some curtains.

After trial, the court in 2003 sentenced Chiong, Bohol and Maliao to death as principals in the crime of rape with homicide. On August 2, 2006, the Court of Appeals (CA) affirmed the conviction, but reduced the penalty to life imprisonment with the abolition of the death penalty.

Maliao appealed his conviction and sought his acquittal of the offense charged.

But the SC said that the CA “correctly held that despite the inadmissibility of his extrajudicial confession (taken by a municipal attorney), Maliao is not entitled to an acquittal because when he testified on cross- examination, he admitted that all the answers he gave to the questions propounded on him by the police investigator are true, and correct of his own personal knowledge.”