PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, Plaintiff-Appellee, vs. JERRY PEPINO y RUERAS and PRECIOSA GOMEZ y CAMPOS, Accused-Appellants. EN BANC, G.R. No. 174471, January 12, 2016.
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d. The Presence of Conspiracy
Conspiracy exists when two or more persons come to an agreement concerning the commission of a crime and decide to commit it. It may be proved by direct or circumstantial evidence consisting of acts, words, or conduct of the alleged conspirators before, during and after the commission of the felony to achieve a common design or purpose.
Proof of the agreement does not need to rest on direct evidence, as the agreement may be inferred from the conduct of the parties indicating a common understanding among them with respect to the commission of the offense. Corollarily, it is not necessary to show that two or more persons met together and entered into an explicit agreement setting out the details of an unlawful scheme or the details by which an illegal objective is to be carried out.52
In the present case, the records establish the following facts: Pepino, Gomez, and another man entered Edward's office, and initially pretended to be customers; the three told Edward that they were going to pay, but Pepino pulled out a gun. After Pepino' s companion took the money from the cashier's box, the malefactors handcuffed him and forced him to go down to the parked car; Gomez sat at the front passenger seat of the car which brought Edward to a safe house in Quezon City; the abductors removed the tape from Edward's eyes, placed him in a room, and then chained his legs upon arrival at the safe house; the abductors negotiated with Edward's family who eventually agreed to a P700,000.00 ransom to be delivered by the family driver using Edward's own car; and after four days, three men and Gomez blindfolded Edward, made him board a car, drove around for 30 minutes, and left him inside his own car at the UP Diliman campus.
The collective, concerted, and synchronized acts of the accused before, during, and after the kidnapping constitute undoubted proof that Gomez and her co-accused conspired with each other to attain a common objective, i.e., to kidnap Edward and detain him illegally in order to demand ransom for his release.
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