The Attorney General’s Office seeks to protect a child-abuse victim’s right to privacy by asking the Superior Court to deny a defendant’s request for disclosure of confidential records pertaining to the girl and her father.<\/p>\n
Assistant Atty. General James Benedetto last week filed a pleading opposing the request of Irvin Dela Cruz Songao, who was charged with child abuse for allegedly having sex with a 13-year old girl.<\/p>\n
The pleading did not specify the “confidential records” that Songao asked to be disclosed at the court.<\/p>\n
Songao has expressed fear that “the violent family dynamic . . . could cause the complaining witness to falsify her testimony.”<\/p>\n
Benedetto said Songao could not justify his request for disclosure of the victim’s and his family’s records, and that he was only attempting to get a material that can be used to attack the credibility of the victim’s testimony at the trial.<\/p>\n
“It would be fundamentally unfair to give the defendant a strategic right to fish for damaging information in the most private and vulnerable areas of a victim’s life at the cost of infringing on the equally important rights of the victim,” Benedetto said.<\/p>\n
“Compelling such disclosures is tantamount to sanctioning the harassment of victims and their families and would render the constitutional provision meaningless,” he added. (Mar-Vic Cagurangan)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Attorney General’s Office seeks to protect a child-abuse victim’s right to privacy by asking the Superior Court to deny a defendant’s request for disclosure of confidential records pertaining to the girl and her father.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}