The Myth of Possession in GR L 5252

The case of The United States v. Pedro Maligalig is not a dry administrative artifact but a profound testament to the law’s mythic construction of reality. At its core lies the ancient, universal truth that possession is not merely a physical state but a moral and legal narrative—a story the state tells about guilt, identity, and order. The defendant, found with stolen horses and unable to offer a satisfactory origin story, becomes ensnared in a presumption that transforms mere custody into culpable authorship. This judicial alchemy, where possession begets presumption and presumption begets principal liability, echoes primordial rituals where the hunted beast found in one’s dwelling rendered the dweller the hunter, the thief, the transgressor against the tribe. The law here operates not as cold logic but as a collective myth-making machine, weaving fact into fable to sustain the social cosmos.

The court’s citation of settled doctrine—the rule that possession of the corpus delicti presumes the possessor is the principal—reveals the jurisprudential instinct to anchor a chaotic world in symbolic order. Like the myth of the scapegoat upon whom the sins of the community are loaded, Maligalig’s unexplained possession becomes a vessel for societal anxiety about theft, disorder, and the violation of property. The legal presumption is a sacred formula, a repeated incantation that consecrates the boundary between the lawful and the outlaw. In refusing to demote his role to that of a mere accessory, the court reinforces the myth that the one who holds the fruit of the crime must be the one who plucked it from the forbidden tree, thereby affirming a moral universe where effects are traced directly to a singular, punishable cause.

Thus, this seemingly technical ruling on criminal liability transcends its colonial Philippine context to touch a universal jurisprudential truth: law is a narrative art that constructs guilt from circumstance to maintain the myth of a just and knowable world. The silent, unexplained possession of the horses becomes a canvas onto which the court projects a story of primary agency, because the law cannot abide moral vacuums or unresolved tales. In condemning Maligalig as principal, the court does not merely apply a rule; it performs a ritual of order, asserting that society’s truth—its ethical narrative—will prevail over the accused’s silent, ambiguous reality. The case endures as a testament to law’s eternal function: to transform human ambiguity into judged myth.

SOURCE: GR L 5252; (February, 1910)