THE Department of Justice (DOJ) has confirmed, through its own leadership, what practitioners have assailed for some time: the bar for filing a criminal case has been deliberately raised. In a recent interview, Justice Secretary Fredderick Vida said prosecutors must now establish “prima facie evidence with reasonable certainty of conviction” before an information is filed — a shift, he explained, from the traditional probable cause standard, meant to ensure that by the time a case reaches the courts, the evidence behind it is already trial-ready.
That is a coherent goal on its own terms. But it rests on an assumption worth testing — that a prosecutor, working from affidavits alone, can reliably judge whether evidence would in fact hold up at trial — before the trial’s own tools for testing that evidence have even been used.
Preliminary investigation has always rested on a simple compromise — prosecutors screen out the clearly baseless, and trial courts do the harder work of sorting truth from falsehood through live testimony, cross-examination and the judge’s own reading of a witness’ demeanor. That compromise has just been changed quietly, but consequentially.
This standard is now formalized in DOJ Department Circular (DC) 015, Series of 2024 (DC 015), which dictates that the evidence on hand, if left uncontroverted, must be sufficient to convict beyond reasonable doubt. On Nov. 11, 2025, the Supreme Court, in Atty. Hazel L. Meking v. Secretary Jesus Crispin C. Remulla (GR 280455) upheld the DOJ’s authority to impose this standard, holding that preliminary investigation is an executive, not a judicial, function, and that DC 015 does not encroach on the Court’s exclusive rule-making power over the courts.
The Supreme Court settled the “authority” question. It did not settle the “wisdom” question — and that is the one that should concern anyone who has sat through a preliminary investigation and a trial, and noticed how differently the two proceedings actually work.
Procedural and structural mismatch
DC 015 itself requires prosecutors to be convinced the evidence is admissible, credible and sufficient to prove every element and the identity of the accused. That is precisely the kind of assessment that, under the Supreme Court’s own earlier ruling in Senator Jinggoy Ejercito Estrada v. Office of the Ombudsman et al. (GR 212140 to 41), was never supposed to happen at the preliminary investigation stage — admissibility and veracity, the court said then, are questions for trial.
The new rule asks prosecutors to make a trial-quality credibility judgment through a non-trial process: sworn affidavits, read on paper, with no cross-examination and no opportunity to observe a witness falter, hesitate, or hold steady under pressure.
The cost of this mismatch
This mismatch does not hit every case equally. Complaints resting on strong documents or physical evidence — falsification, financial crimes, some corruption cases — are relatively insulated. Complaints that live or die on a witness’ credibility — sexual violence, domestic abuse, harassment, cyber libel, bullying disputes — are exactly the cases where cross-examination tends to matter most, and exactly the cases most exposed to being screened out before they ever reach a courtroom.
A complainant who cannot afford to build a trial-ready case before filing — additional affidavits, forensic corroboration, expert reports — is now disadvantaged at the door, not just at the verdict.
The DOJ’s stated goal is to decongest trial court dockets by filtering weak cases earlier. But DC 015 dismissals are without prejudice; complainants may refile with new evidence, move for reconsideration, appeal to the Prosecutor General or the Secretary of Justice, or seek Rule 65 certiorari before the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court on grounds of grave abuse of discretion. The congestion does not disappear — it relocates, from trial courts to the DOJ’s appellate machinery and the appellate courts.
Meanwhile, repeated case buildup cycles and refilings raise a live concern over prescriptive periods, only partly addressed by the 2025 case of People v. Ulysses Consebido (GR 258563), which held that the filing of a complaint and the conduct of summary investigation tolls the running of prescription — a holding that does not extend to every scenario of delay a claimant may face.
What the Supreme Court left open
Meking resolved a separation-of-powers dispute. It expressly preserved judicial review for cases where the application of DC 015 violates constitutional rights. That reservation matters, because the concern raised here — meritorious, testimony-dependent complaints dismissed for want of documentary polish rather than want of merit — is not foreclosed by Meking. It is simply waiting for its own case.
None of this argues that DC 015 was issued without authority; the Supreme Court has spoken clearly on that. It argues that authority and wisdom are different questions, and that the DOJ’s own text — requiring credibility findings without the tools credibility findings require — deserves scrutiny the court was never asked to give it.
Docket relief that comes at the cost of screening out cases a trial court would have convicted is not decongestion. It is a quieter form of denial of justice, disguised in the language of efficiency.
Author’s note: News information was sourced from The Manila Times (July 13, 2026). Legal discussions derived from DOJ Department Circulars 015 and 028 (Series of 2024) and cited Supreme Court decisions.
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