“No Witness, No Justice.”

The Belize Police Department is working towards reducing the number of unresolved murder cases in the country. According to Commissioner of Police Chester Williams, there is a backlog of open cases that remain unresolved for a multitude of reasons, primarily a lack of key witnesses. Williams says that most cases would arrive at a resolution earlier if witnesses appeared before the court; however, he explains that the department is working diligently to find other means of bringing these cases to justice.

 

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police

“Many a times we have, even though we might have a tight case in terms of evidence, a case is only as good as the investigation. In order to make an arrest and a prosecution is only as good as the witnesses that comes before the court. Say you have, for example, mister Pandi, who is a witness in a murder. He gave a very good statement to the police in terms of him witnessing what took place. On the day of trial, mister Pandi refused to come to court and testify before the court. What is going to happen? No witness, no justice. So because of that, we are seeing that a number of the cases have fallen through the courts and even though sometimes they The response from the public is that the police conduct co investigation or the DPP office do not prosecute. It is not a matter of that. It’s a matter of the fact that the witnesses do not come to court. So what we have done recently with the installation of the cameras we have had in Belize city, we have been able to solve a number of these cases. And because of that, even when the witnesses don’t come to court, we can rely on those evidence and we’re convicting a number of persons. So if you look at the trend over the past year and a half, you would have seen that a number of persons have been convicted for murder, as opposed to before when we were hearing just nulliplus. So significant progress has been made. We have also used DNA evidence to convict certain people. Again, through our ministry, our minister, we have been able, we are currently looking at procuring the field DNA testing, which will be used again to enhance investigation.”