PSHS student in poisoning case gets into MIT but can't leave

A Quezon City court has issued a hold departure order against a former student of the Philippine Science High School (PSHS) who is facing frustrated murder charges for allegedly putting a toxic chemical in a water jug that nearly killed one of his schoolmates last February. The prosecution panel filed the petition to bar the 17-year-old suspect from leaving the country after learning that he had been accepted into the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Colgate University in New York. Private prosecutor Eugenio Villareal added in the plea that the former student of the state-run PSHS, the country’s premier high school, had access to funding to leave for the United States. "The reason behind the issuance of the hold departure order is to protect the right of the State to prosecute a person who is criminally charged," said Judge Maria Lourdes Giron of Quezon City regional trial court (RTC) branch 102 in her four-page order dated October 26. The court maintained that the hold departure order was not an infringement or curtailment of the accused right to travel but only to maintain court jurisdiction over the accused. "If an accused has abandoned and goes to another jurisdiction, the court cannot anymore exercise its coercive power over the accused considering that it is a well settled rule that the power of the court can only be exercised within its jurisdiction," Giron added. The Quezon City judge ordered the Department of Foreign Affairs and Bureau of Immigration to include the name of the accused, a resident of Las Piñas City, in the list of individuals barred from leaving the country. The student will also be arraigned on November 13, after Giron junked a motion to defer the arraignment pending the resolution of the motion for reconsideration the suspect filed with the Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office. Quezon City Assistant City Prosecutor Ferdinand Baylon had recommended the filing of frustrated murder charges against the suspect and another student, a 16-year old boy, after finding probable cause to indict them in court. The other accused was arraigned last October 4 and entered a "not guilty" plea. The two boys were accused of lacing the water jug of another student with mercury nitrate during recess at the PSHS, located along Agham Road in Quezon City. Instead of the girl who owned the jug, another 16-year-old student drank from it, who suffered from acute renal failure and had to undergo dialysis treatment. "The boys have acted together and cooperated with one another and shared the same intention of poisoning another student by deliberately and intentionally with discernment putting a poisonous substance- mercury nitrate – into her jug, which injured a different person," Baylon had said in his resolution. (GMANews.TV is withholding the names of the students involved in the case because they are minors.) -GMANews.TV