Short answer. No. An accessory to a consummated felony is punished two degrees below the penalty prescribed for that felony. Article 53 treats helping after the fact as a lesser form of participation than committing the crime — but it is still a crime, and a lower degree is not an acquittal.
What the law says
The penalty lower by two degrees than that prescribed by law for the consummated felony shall be imposed upon the accessories to the commission of a consummated felony.
Revised Penal Code, Article 53 — Accessories To A Consummated Felony. Read the full provision →
What the article fixes
Article 53 provides that the penalty lower by two degrees than that prescribed by law for the consummated felony shall be imposed upon the accessories to the commission of a consummated felony. Two things follow. The reduction is measured from the penalty for the finished crime, so that penalty has to be identified first. And a degree is a step down the Code's ordered list of penalties rather than a fraction taken off a term, which is why the reduction cannot be worked out arithmetically from a number of years.
Being an accessory is not the same as being present
The Code reaches a person who, knowing a crime was committed and without having taken part in it as principal or accomplice, comes in afterwards — by profiting from its effects, by concealing or destroying the body of the crime to prevent discovery, or by harbouring or assisting the escape of the offender in the circumstances the law specifies. Knowledge of the crime is the element most often fought over, because helping a relative or a friend without being told what happened is a very different situation from doing so with full awareness.
The exemption for close relatives
The Code excuses certain people from liability as accessories where the principal is a spouse, an ascendant, a descendant, a sibling, or a relative by affinity within the same degrees. The exemption reflects a judgement that the law should not demand that a person turn in his own family. It is not unlimited: it does not cover an accessory who profited from the effects of the crime or assisted the offender to profit from them. Whether a particular act falls inside or outside that carve-out is a question of what was actually done.
What this means in practice
If you have been named as an accessory, the charge is a real criminal charge with its own penalty, and the reduction does not make it a formality. If you are the complainant, the same rule means the person who helped afterwards will not face the penalty the principal faces. Either way, what matters is the evidence of what the person knew and when, and the amounts printed in older copies of the Code are unreliable because later legislation revised them. Bring the information and any statements to a lawyer early.