This Cruz conviction comes on the heels of a string of other recent convictions for high profile killings that the DPP's office has earned this year.
It's an encouraging development - and a change in trend from a few years ago when it was lamented that Belize had a 5% conviction rate - if that.
Today, COMPOL Williams discussed the key elements that have made prosecutions more successful:
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"Certainly, we have heard the notion for quite some time now that our murder conviction rate is at 3 or 5%, even though that was not the actual rate we had, but that's the public perception then and the police department as well as the office of director of public prosecution has been given a bad rap per say, in that we were either unable to properly investigate or the prosecutors were unable to properly prosecute. Even though if you were to do an analysis of the cases, we have had that were not successful in prosecution, you would see that a very high percentage of those cases fell apart due to none cooperation of witnesses particularly this year. We have seen a number of convictions for murder and like you said in some very high-profile cases as well and this can be attributed to the fact that we are getting more and more cooperation from witnesses, 2) we are using more and more technology particularly in the form of video footages and other technological needs to be able to tie people to cases and so the need for I see witnesses per say is to some extent eliminated. It's not totally gone, because no matter what happens we still will have to rely with some extent on I see witnesses and again, we must give credit to the DPP office. I can say that the DPP have a committed staff and they work extra hours, they worked overtime to make sure that they are properly prepared for their cases, make sure they prepare their investigators or the witnesses who goes to court and testify, so the credit needs to be given particularly to the DPP office."
"The DPP has been very instrumental in terms of providing training for our investigators. Before Covid, she uses to do every month a one-day training with investigators. Again, the purpose of that training was to bring to the attention of investigators some of the common errors that she would find when she peruses the files that were sent to her office and based on that we'd find the amount of errors that they would find within these files that going to the DPP office reduces tremendously because of the fact that she is there with them every month and I think that most of the credit need to be given to her, her commitment, her dedication."
Jules Vasquez
"Is it that we are finally able to produce what would be called professional investigations from a forensic perspective. How much of a role does that play?"
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"Due to the complexity of crime, it is also important that our capabilities to be able to deal with the scourge of crime from an investigation standpoint must also improve to be able to meet the complexity of crime. Yes, we are not where we want to be, there is still more work to be done and I know that one of the greatest thing that Belizean people would want to see is the DNA capability at the NAP and it is something that is not going to happen overnight. I can tell you that our minister is committed to that and again, it is not just to say one day we are going to buy a DNA machine and install it and tomorrow we have DNA evidence, its not that way how it works. There is a lot that we are trying to do to improve the justice system to make it more workable. At the end of the day people want that whenever they are aggrieved by a crime particularly these heinous type of crimes, that there sufficient capability of the part of the state to be able to properly investigate these matters and to prosecute them successfully."
