Over eleven years after the tragic death of 18-year-old high school student Hilbert Sotz in police custody, the Court of Appeal has sharply corrected what it termed an "unduly lenient" sentence, ordering former police constables Hallet King and Leonard Nunez back to prison.
Chief Justice Louise Esther Blenman, presiding alongside Court President Minnet Hafiz-Bertram and Justice of Appeal Michelle Arana, quashed the original nine-month sentences handed down in 2019 and substituted them with terms of 10 years and 2 months.
The case dates back to June 8, 2015, when Sotz was detained on Caye Caulker in connection with a series of burglaries. While locked in a interrogation room, Sotz was severely beaten by King and Nunez. Sotz was pronounced dead on arrival at the local health centre from head trauma that caused fatal blood clotting.
In July 2019, a jury unanimously found both officers guilty of manslaughter by unlawful harm. However, at sentencing in August 2019, the trial judge erroneously treated the conviction as a lesser form of manslaughter by negligence. The judge imposed a mere nine-month sentence and, because the officers had already spent 10 months in pre-trial detention, they walked out of court completely free on time served.
DPP Cheryl-Lynn Vidal SC immediately sought leave to appeal the sentences. Meanwhile, the officers appealed their convictions, which a previous Court of Appeal panel controversially quashed. The battle went all the way to the CCJ, which reinstated the manslaughter convictions on January 20, 2026, and ordered the Court of Appeal to hear the DPP's appeal regarding the sentence.
In its decision today, the Court of Appeal ruled that a nine-month sentence for a fatal custody beating was "wholly outside the permissible range" and a gross distortion of the jury's verdict. Using the newly established 2025 Senior Courts Sentencing Guidelines, the panel calculated a baseline sentence of 15 years, which was adjusted to 18 years due to aggravating factors - specifically the extreme breach of public trust by law enforcement officers.
The court reduced the sentence to 15 years to account for the officers' prior clean records, and shaved off an additional 4 years as a remedy for the state-caused pre-trial delays, bringing the sentence to 11 years. After granting full credit for the 10 months they originally spent on remand, the final net sentence was set at 10 years and 2 months.
King and Nunez have been ordered to surrender themselves to the Queen Street Police Station in Belize City by 10:00 AM on July 29, 2026, to begin serving their time at the Belize Central Prison.
