Lawyers for the sole survivor of an alleged extrajudicial killing by the police during an antidrug operation nine years ago are urging the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling upholding the Office of the Ombudsman’s decision to junk their petition to charge four officers and six civilian informants with multiple murder and frustrated murder.
In their motion for reconsideration filed last Dec. 5, the lawyers for Efren M. Morillo, a fruit and vegetable vendor from Payatas, Quezon City, said that if the high court doesn’t reverse itself, it would be creating “a potentially absurd situation” in which the alleged mastermind of the drug war—former president Rodrigo Duterte—is detained by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands awaiting trial for the crime against humanity of murder, while the direct perpetrators could not even be prosecuted.
They said the case faced serious risk of becoming an “emblematic example” of the Philippines’ inaction in investigating or prosecuting crimes against humanity.
This case stemmed from the alleged summary execution of four men during a “tokhang” operation on Aug. 21, 2016, in Payatas, where Morillo said Quezon City police officers shot him and his four friends after they were rounded up, unarmed, while playing pool.
‘Nanlaban’
According to the police version of the incident, the officers were forced to fire back at the men because they allegedly resisted arrest—or “nanlaban,” the standard excuse for gunning down suspected drug offenders.
Morillo, who was shot in the chest, survived by pretending to be dead.
In March 2017, he and the relatives of the four other victims filed complaints of multiple murder and frustrated murder against the police and their informers in the Office of the Ombudsman.
The lawyers said that despite the overwhelming physical and forensic evidence of an “execution-style” killing, on top of Morillo’s eyewitness testimony, the Ombudsman dismissed their complaints in November 2022 for “lack of probable cause,” and then affirmed the dismissal in March 2024.
In July 2024, they filed a petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court to correct the “grave abuse of discretion” by the Ombudsman for failing to conduct a full investigation and disregarding the evidence.
Last June 30, the high court’s five-member First Division headed by Chief Justice Alexander Gesmundo dismissed their petition in a minute resolution “for failure…to sufficiently show that any grave abuse of discretion was committed by the Office of the Ombudsman.” The First Division added that the Ombudsman’s decision appeared to be “in accord with the facts and the applicable law and jurisprudence.”
The Center for International Law Philippines (or CenterLaw), a nonprofit lawyers’ group that advocates for human rights, humanitarian law and freedom of expression, provided legal assistance to Morillo and the families of the other victims in the case.
Their motion for reconsideration appeals to the Supreme Court to reverse its one-page June 2025 ruling, overturn the Ombudsman’s decision to reject the victims’ criminal complaints against the police, and order it to proceed with the filing of criminal cases against those responsible for the extrajudicial killing.
“This case exemplifies both the direct liability of the police shooters and the broader criminality now under ICC trial—yet the Respondent Ombudsman’s dismissal, and this High Court’s initial Resolution adopting it, would effectively exonerate these direct perpetrators,” the lawyers said in the motion.
They added: “The result is a legal paradox: while an ICC proceeding exists for the masterminds behind the Philippine drug-war killings on the strength of emblematic cases such as this one, Philippine domestic processes risk ‘no prosecution’ against the direct actors of the crime.
“This effectively signals impunity for low-level perpetrators of the Philippine ‘war on drugs’ whose accountability is most vital to its immediate victims, thus placing petitioners and the other thousands of drug war victims in peril, and eventually undermining the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to life.”
Eyewitness account
According to Philippine Daily Inquirer reports on Morillo’s own account in his affidavit-complaint, he was at his friend Nonoy Daa’s house in Payatas, where they were playing pool with other friends—Jessie Cule, Rhaffy Gabo and Anthony Comendo—when plainclothes officers raided it.
Their hands were tied and they were taken to the back of the house where they were allegedly tortured as they pleaded for mercy.
The officers were identified as Senior Insp. Emil Garcia, PO3 Allan Formilleza, PO1 James Aggarao and PO1 Melchor Navisaga. Morillo, then 28, said he was the first to be shot; the bullet smashed into his chest and he fell. He said the shooter was Formilleza.
“I saw him fire two shots at Nonoy, who fell to the ground beside me and started running out of breath,” Morillo said. “Then he fired another shot at Nonoy. Thoroughly frightened that I might be shot again, I closed my eyes and played dead.”
The officers told reporters then that Morillo and his friends were caught using shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) and had fired at them, forcing them to shoot back.
After the officers left Morillo and the others for dead, he crawled a few meters to a ravine, crossed a creek and climbed down a hill to reach a road, according to CenterLaw lawyer Gil Anthony Aquino in an article in the Inquirer on Aug. 22, 2017.
Morillo was given first aid at the Montalban Infirmary but, adding to his terror, he was then taken to the Quezon City Police District’s Station 6, which covers Payatas.
Not content with almost killing him and to maintain their “nanlaban” narrative, the police charged him with assault. He was acquitted in March 2023.
The evidence presented in the Metropolitan Trial Court demolished the police account of the August 2016 Payatas raid. These were cited by his lawyers in their petition to the Ombudsman to prosecute the officers and again in their current motion to the Supreme Court to overturn the Ombudsman’s dismissal of that petition.
The trial court said Morillo was never proven to have owned or fired a gun and took no unlawful action against the police. The officers’ claim of self-defense was also belied by medical findings of “execution-style” downward trajectories of the bullets that they fired at Morillo and his friends.
Writ of amparo
In addition to the evidence gathered from the trial, Morillo’s lawyers also cited the evidence presented to back the writ of amparo petition and a temporary protection order for Morillo that was granted in 2017 by the Supreme Court itself. The Court of Appeals later made the protection order permanent.
The writ of amparo is a legal remedy for the protection and enforcement of rights to life, liberty and personal security, especially against threats from extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance.
In their motion, Morillo’s lawyers specifically urged the Supreme Court to “set aside” its June 30, 2025, resolution dismissing their petition for certiorari, declare that the Ombudsman committed grave abuse of discretion, nullify the Ombudsman’s resolution and joint order, direct it to find probable cause against the four officers and their informants, or order it to conduct a new preliminary investigation with instructions to, among others, evaluate all evidence from the petitioners and the judicial findings from Morillo’s trial and the writ of amparo proceedings.
The lawyers cited five grounds for their motion, including and leading with the Ombudsman’s grave abuse of discretion when it “blatantly disregarded” uncontroverted and judicially established evidence of probable cause. Another is the “very meritorious” nature of the case in that the killings were admitted by the state agents themselves.
The fifth ground cited the necessity to prevent “a complete miscarriage of justice,” quoting from one of the high court’s previous decisions involving the Ombudsman where it said that “judicial review becomes necessary where the OMB’s actions are patently arbitrary, unsupported by evidence, or amount to a virtual refusal to perform its duty.”
“If this Honorable Court’s Resolution of dismissal stands, the consequences are grave, irreversible, and wholly incompatible with the 1987 Constitution,” the lawyers said.
They argued that as a result, no one will be held accountable for the “summary execution” of the four unarmed civilians; the survivor would be denied a chance to seek prosecution; judicial findings from the trial court ruling and the writ of amparo directives would become meaningless; the medical, forensic and testimonial evidence would be erased; the Ombudsman’s “fatally flawed” investigatory process will escape judicial review; and the “entrenched pattern of ‘nanlaban’ killings would be normalized and legitimized.”
Still fearing for his life
According to CenterLaw executive director Gilbert Andres, Morillo still feels that his life is in constant danger.
“I can really say that he is deeply disappointed with the minute resolution,” Andres said.
The lawyer was surprised that the Supreme Court resolved their petition against the Ombudsman with a one-pager. Andres said he hoped that its ruling on their motion would be, not another minute resolution, but “more extensive, given the gravity of the facts.”
Morillo’s lawyers also moved that their motion be discussed and decided by the en banc, or all 15 members of the high court.
