A court may sentence an accused found guilty of online libel to payment of fine only, rather than imprisonment.
Thus held the Supreme Court En Banc, through Associate Justice Antonio T. Kho, Jr., as it denied the Petition for Review on Certiorari filed by the People of the Philippines against Jomerito S. Soliman. The petition claimed that the Court of Appeals (CA) committed grave abuse of discretion when it affirmed the Decision of the Regional Trial Court (RTC) convicting Soliman for online libel and sentencing him to pay a fine of PhP50,000.
In 2018, Soliman faced charges for online libel under the Cybercrime Prevention Act (Republic Act No. 10175) for a Facebook post criticizing Waldo R. Carpio, then Assistant Secretary of the Department of Agriculture. The Regional Trial Court found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt and imposed a fine of PhP50,000, citing Supreme Court Administrative Circular No. 08-2008. Soliman paid the fine and did not appeal his conviction. However, the Office of the Solicitor General filed an appeal before the Court of Appeals, alleging an abuse of discretion by the RTC for imposing a fine instead of imprisonment.
Section 6 of the Cybercrime Prevention Act imposes upon online libel, or libel committed through information and communication technologies, a penalty that is one degree higher than ‘traditional’ libel, or libel under the Revised Penal Code (RPC).
Under the RPC, as amended by RA 10951, the penalty for traditional libel is “prision correcional in its minimum and medium periods or a fine ranging from PhP40,000 to PhP1,200,000, or both.”
The Court ruled that the RPC recognizes that the penalty of fine may be imposed as a single or alternative penalty for libel, as evident in the RPC’s “plain use of the disjunctive word ‘or’ between the term of imprisonment and fine, such word signaling disassociation or independence between the two words.”
Read more at https://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/sc-for-online-libel-courts-may-impose-alternative-penalty-of-fine-instead-of-imprisonment/.
Read the Decision in full at https://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/256700-people-of-the-philippines-vs-jomerito-s-soliman/. Read the Concurring Opinion of Chief Justice Alexander G. Gesmundo at https://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/256700-concurring-opinion-chief-justice-alexander-g-gesmundo/ and the Separate Opinion of Associate Justice Alfredo Benjamin S. Caguioa at https://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/256700-separate-opinion-justice-alfredo-benjamin-s-caguioa/.
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