Mario C. Duaves, the presiding judge of the Regional Trial Court Branch 15 of Davao City, was the judge who issued the Temporary Protection Order (TPO) in favor of fugitive preacher Apollo Quiboloy’s Kingdom of Jesus Christ August 27.
On Sept. 3, the Court of Appeals (CA) nullified the temporary protection order issued by Duaves.
Who is Judge Duaves? A little background check won’t hurt.
In 2021, Duaves applied for the post of Deputy Ombudsman for Mindanao, along with three others. Albeit he failed to get the appointment, the competition for such a position tells us that under Rodrigo Duterte, vying for judicial posts was a contest of whom among the applicants was closest to Duterte.
For example, Duterte eventually appointed Anderson Lo who was an undersecretary at the Presidential Management Staff in Malacañang. Lo was appointed there when the PMS was under Duterte aide Bong Go. In 2016, Lo’s wife Jill Rose Jaugan Lo was Duterte’s first appointee to a Davao city regional trial court. In 2013, the then Municipal Circuit Court judge Mrs. Lo administered the oath of office as city mayor to Rodrigo Duterte.
Surprised at having been chosen by Duterte for his oath taking, she asked “Why me?” Mrs. Lo was candid: “Later that day, my husband Andy, who is a friend of Bong Go, told me the mayor was looking for a lady judge to administer his oath.”
Was this a case in point of the state of the judiciary in Duterte-controlled Davao city? There were also rumors, for instance, that in the case of Duaves, he was closely linked to a former city administrator of Davao city hall. Rumors fly high in a city where media was not free to report anything of dissent on the Dutertes.
In December 2017, then vice mayor Paolo Duterte and his brother in-law Mans Carpio, Sara Duterte’s husband, filed a civil damage suit of P6.6M against then senator Antonio Trillanes IV for extortion allegations against them. The case was raffled off to the sala of Judge Duaves.
The filing of the case by the Duterte son and Carpio is a consequential one. The main gist of the Duterte-Carpio complaint was Trillanes’s having linked them to the P6.4 billion worth of shabu that slipped past the Bureau of Customs (BOC) in May 2017. As of this writing seven years later, the case is still unresolved, although it was later assigned to another RTC branch.
In May of 2021, the Supreme Court reprimanded Duaves for exchanging text messages with the parties to an estate settlement case. In the SC’s 6-page minute resolution A.M. No. RTJ-21-2605, the high court’s 2nd division found Duaves guilty of violating Canon 4 of the New Code of Judicial Conduct for the Philippine Judiciary. The SC strictly warned him that a repetition of his conduct would be dealt with more severely.
A counsel of one of the parties filed the complaint. Duaves admitted the allegation but reasoned that he merely wanted to “link” the factions by forwarding messages. In other words, he was forwarding messages from one to the other. The SC said it held him liable for “violating the requirement to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in all their activities.”
“Respondent’s act discloses a deficiency in prudence and discretion that a member of the Judiciary must exercise in the performance of his official functions and of his activities as a private individual,” the SC said.
“It is never trite to caution respondent to be prudent and circumspect in both speech and action, keeping in mind that conduct in and out of the courtroom is always under constant observation.”
The latest on Duaves just this first week of September was by no means good news. The members of Quiboloy’s sect lost their initial jubilation over Duaves’s TPO against the arresting cops of the Philippine National Police’s Region 11 inside the 30-hectare KOJC Compound in Davao City.
The Court of Appeals nullified Duaves’s TPO. The 5-page resolution of the CA said Duaves’s TPO had no jurisdiction. Last May, the Supreme Court had ordered the transfer of venue of all criminal cases against Quiboloy from Davao City to Quezon City (A.M. No. 24-04-29-RTC).
The CA ruled: “To allow the public respondent to continue hearing the case would certainly circumvent the mandate of the Supreme Court.”
Court sources describe Duaves as having started his career as legal chief in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources Region 11. He then went into private practice for some time.
Rodrigo Duterte appointed him judge.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.