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Salcedo-Ortanez VS Ca
Salcedo-Ortanez VS Ca
Facts:
Private respondent Rafael Ortanez filed with the Quezon City RTC a complaint for annulment of marriage
with damages against petitioner Teresita Salcedo-Ortanez, on grounds of lack of marriage license and/or
psychological incapacity of the petitioner.
Among the exhibits offered by private respondent were three (3) cassette tapes of alleged telephone
conversations between petitioner and unidentified persons.
Teresita submitted her Objection/Comment to Rafael’s oral offer of evidence. However, the trial court
admitted all of private respondent’s offered evidence and later on denied her motion for reconsideration,
prompting petitioner to file a petition for certiorari with the CA to assail the admission in evidence of the
aforementioned cassette tapes.
These tape recordings were made and obtained when private respondent allowed his friends from the
military to wiretap his home telephone.
CA denied the petition because (1) Tape recordings are not inadmissible per se. They and any other
variant thereof can be admitted in evidence for certain purposes, depending on how they are presented
and offered and on how the trial judge utilizes them in the interest of truth and fairness and the even
handed administration of justice; and (2) A petition for certiorari is notoriously inappropriate to rectify a
supposed error in admitting evidence adduced during trial. The ruling on admissibility is interlocutory;
neither does it impinge on jurisdiction. If it is erroneous, the ruling should be questioned in the appeal
from the judgment on the merits and not through the special civil action of certiorari. The error, assuming
gratuitously that it exists, cannot be anymore than an error of law, properly correctible by appeal and not
by certiorari.
Petitioner then filed the present petition for review under Rule 45 of the Rules of Court.
Issue:
Whether or not the recordings of the telephone conversations are admissible in evidence
Ruling:
No. Republic Act No. 4200 entitled “An Act to Prohibit and Penalize Wire Tapping and Other Related
Violations of the Privacy of Communication, and for other purposes” expressly makes such tape
recordings inadmissible in evidence.
Sec. 1. It shall be unlawful for any person, not being authorized by all the parties to any private
communication or spoken word, to tap any wire or cable, or by using any other device or arrangement, to
secretly overhear, intercept, or record such communication or spoken word by using a device commonly
known as a dictaphone or dictagraph or detectaphone or walkie-talkie or tape-recorder, or however
otherwise described. . . .
Sec. 4. Any communication or spoken word, or the existence, contents, substance, purport, or meaning of
the same or any part thereof, or any information therein contained, obtained or secured by any person in
violation of the preceding sections of this Act shall not be admissible in evidence in any judicial, quasi-
judicial, legislative or administrative hearing or investigation.
Clearly, respondents trial court and Court of Appeals failed to consider the afore-quoted provisions of the
law in admitting in evidence the cassette tapes in question. Absent a clear showing that both parties to
the telephone conversations allowed the recording of the same, the inadmissibility of the subject tapes is
mandatory under R.A. No. 4200.