The craft lies in the statement of the acts or omissions. This is where months of preliminary investigation and thousands of pages of documents and affidavits are compressed into a narrative that tracks every element of the offense.
A criminal Information is one of the shortest documents in a case file and one of the most consequential. It usually runs two to three pages. Everything that follows, from the evidence admitted to the penalty imposed, is measured against it.
The Rules of Court set the minimum. An Information must name the accused, designate the offense with reference to the law violated, state the acts or omissions constituting the offense, identify the offended party and give the approximate date and place of commission.
It must charge one offense only, unless the law prescribes a single punishment for several. Qualifying and aggravating circumstances must be alleged, and alleged with specificity, because a court cannot appreciate what the prosecution did not plead.
Compliance with that checklist is not the same as good drafting. The craft lies in the statement of the acts or omissions. This is where months of preliminary investigation and thousands of pages of documents and affidavits are compressed into a narrative that tracks every element of the offense. The test is whether a person of common understanding, reading it once, knows exactly what he is accused of doing, when, where and how.
Before the Sandiganbayan, the burden is heavier. Jurisdictional facts must appear on the face of the Information: the position held by the accused, the salary grade and the relation between the office and the offense.
For a charge under Section 3(e) of Republic Act 3019, the drafter must allege the modality relied upon, whether manifest partiality, evident bad faith, or gross inexcusable negligence and must allege undue injury or unwarranted benefit as facts rather than as conclusions. Copying the language of the statute is the easiest shortcut and the most expensive one.
Two errors recur. The first is vagueness, which invites a motion to quash or a bill of particulars and stalls arraignment. The second is overcrowding, where the drafter pours in evidentiary detail that belongs in the judicial affidavits and is then bound at trial to prove every surplus word.
Restraint is part of the skill. Allege the elements and the essential facts and leave the proof to the proof.
The useful discipline is to draft backward from the elements. List them. Assign to each one the specific fact and the document or witness that will establish it. If a box cannot be filled, the case is not ready and no amount of careful phrasing will hide the gap.
An Information is the prosecution theory reduced to writing, and it is the only theory the court will entertain. Prepared with care, it carries a case to judgment. Prepared carelessly, it defeats the case before the first witness is sworn in. It can make or break a prosecution.
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