The Philippines government is demanding that the Court of Appeals reinstate the arrest of two men convicted of killing an American Marine officer in Makati City in 2012.
The two convicted men were allowed to walk free after a petition filed on January 26, 2015, in the Office of the Solicitor General asking the court to set aside the September 2014 order of Judge Winlove Dumayas. The petition asked to suspend the sentence of Crispin de la Paz and Garlicano Datu III, two of the four men involved in the murder of US Marine Major George Anikow.
Anikow was beaten and stabbed to death by a four Filipino men on the night of November 24, 2012, outside the gate to his subdivision.
In 2014, Makati Regional Trial Court Branch #59 found De la Paz and Datu guilty, but for the lesser crime of homicide – both men were sent to prison for a six year stint and ordered to pay Anikow’s family in New Jersey 375,000 pesos in damages.
The other two men were acquitted for their part in the killing – the judge in the case gave the two convicted men a lesser sentence for ‘incomplete self-defence’ and ‘voluntary surrender’ as mitigating circumstances.
The US Ambassador to the Philippines, Philip Goldberg, expressed his disappointment over the suspension of the sentence of the two convicted killers, saying that “no one served a day for the brutal crime”.
The US Embassy and acting Solicitor General Florin Hilbay said the judge in the case acted with ‘grave abuse’ in granting the probation.
One damning piece of evidence is a CCTV camera tape showing Anikow bleeding and fleeing the scene of the crime when the four men chased him down, killing him by stabbing him repeatedly until he was motionless.