STC students’ lawyer will not contest SC ruling on case

“Maybe, we’ll leave it at that.”

This was the response of lawyer Cornelio Mercado after the Supreme Court (SC) ruled in favor of St. Theresa’s College (STC) on a case involving controversial photos of students posted on a social networking site.

Mercado, the counsel of the parents whose students were barred from attending the graduation rites in March 2012 for posting bikini photos on Facebook (FB), said he has no plans of filing a motion for reconsideration to contest the High Court’s ruling.

He said he has yet to talk with his clients.

In its ruling, the High Court said STC did not violate the students’ right to privacy when it purportedly extracted “obscene” photos of the students on FB.

The SC also said that there is no basis to order STC to surrender the controversial photos to the petitioners.

The High Court declared that “nothing is ever private on FB.”

The Facebook photos of the students which STC described as “lewd, obscene, and immoral” were cited as the basis for banning five seniors from joining the high school  graduation  rites.

Four went to court but only two complainants pursued the case.

The parents of the two students sought the SC’s intervention to order STC to surrender the controversial photos to them.

The parents insisted that their children’s FB accounts were under “very private” or “Only Friends” setting, safeguarded with a password.

But the High Court gave credence to the testimony of STC computer teacher Mylene Rheza Escudero who claimed that she did not access the students’ FB accounts to obtain the photos.
Escudero said other students showed her the pictures of the girls clad in brassieres, smoking inside a bar and drinking hard liquor.