On November 10th the Director of Public Prosecutions instructed the Police Department to charge police constable Jesus Marroquin with murder. The directive came after the shooting death of a mentally ill man, Egbert Gordon Jr., in Los Lagos. It took some foot dragging but police today released that 23 year old police officer Jesus Marroquin with murder. He is expected to appear in Magistrate's Court tomorrow.
And while he will be making an appearance at the lower courts, attorney for the Gordon family Antonette Moore was planning to take the Police Department's refusal to charge Marroquin to the Supreme Court for judicial review. The charges now brought however will now change her strategy however advocacy group for the mentally ill in Belize the mental health association today issued a release on the matter. Its secretary Kathy Esquivel says they are hoping to change the way mentally ill persons are treated.
Kathy Esquivel, Mental Health Association
"Events like this, although they are terrible, they are a way to bring to the attention of the public the fact that the mentally ill in Belize, both by practice and by law, our laws are archaic and they need to be reviewed and we are working and lobbying for that because we don't afford basic human rights to people with mental health problems and this is a very important case, it could set a very important precedent and hopefully the police will learn from this. This is about, I think, the fifth mentally ill person who has died at the hands of the police or security forces in the last couple of years. We are very concerned.
We think there needs to be protocols, the police need to know how to deal with people and that there are professionals in the country and I think we are very concerned that people don't apply the same human rights to the people with mental problems as they are applied to other people and everybody, regardless of their mental health status, has the same human rights. There is a group working on a policy for mental health and we hope to have that ready very soon. And if that were accepted, the next stage is then to get consultants, experts, to come in and look at the legislation we have with a view to reviewing the whole legislation. But the review, which has been done in other countries, we don't have to reinvent the wheel."
