G.R. No. 84087 April 12, 1989
TEODORA CATUIRA, petitioner, vs. THE HON. COURT OF APPEALS, THE HON. EUSTAQUIO P. STO. DOMINGO, and THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, respondents.

FACTS

Petitioner Teodora Catuira was charged with ten counts of violating the Bouncing Checks Law (B.P. Blg. 22). She filed a motion to quash the informations on two grounds: that they did not charge an offense and that the criminal action had prescribed. The prosecution opposed but subsequently filed an Ex Parte Motion to Amend Informations, attaching ten amended informations. The Regional Trial Court (RTC) denied the motion to quash. It ruled the first ground was moot due to the filing of amended informations before arraignment, and that prescription had not set in, calculating a fifteen-year prescriptive period under the Revised Penal Code from the 1982 commission of the acts to the 1986 filing.
Catuira elevated the case via a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court, which referred it to the Court of Appeals (CA). The CA dismissed the petition for insufficiency in form and substance, noting the failure to submit certified true copies of the assailed orders and that the alleged errors were not jurisdictional but correctable by appeal. Catuira then filed this petition for review.

ISSUE

Whether the Court of Appeals committed grave abuse of discretion in dismissing the petition for certiorari and whether the RTC correctly denied the motion to quash, particularly on the grounds of prescription and the propriety of the amended informations.

RULING

The Supreme Court denied the petition, affirming the CA’s dismissal and the RTC’s orders. The CA correctly dismissed the petition for certiorari due to Catuira’s failure to comply with the mandatory procedural requirement under Rule 65 to submit certified true copies of the challenged orders, rendering it deficient in form. On the substantive issues, the RTC did not commit grave abuse of discretion. The fiscal’s act of filing amended informations before the accused pleaded was expressly sanctioned by Section 14, Rule 110 of the Rules of Court, making the motion to quash based on defective allegations moot. Any error in the court’s exercise of its jurisdiction is correctible by appeal, not certiorari.
Regarding prescription, the trial court correctly held the crimes had not prescribed, albeit for a different legal basis. The offenses involved estafa through bouncing checks under Article 315(2)(d) of the Revised Penal Code, as penalties were increased by P.D. No. 818. Since the amounts involved (the lowest being P17,800) warranted penalties of reclusion temporal to reclusion perpetua, the prescriptive period under Article 90 of the Revised Penal Code is twenty years, not fifteen. Even under the special law ( Act No. 3326 , as amended) invoked by petitioner, which provides a twelve-year period for offenses punishable by imprisonment of six years or more, prescription had not lapsed. The informations were filed well within any applicable prescriptive period from the 1982 discovery of the crime.