“We don’t want to look at what appears, we want to see what was done, and what was done according to the affidavits is that the prison authorities have a parolee, who happened to be working at the prison at the time when they suspect he had engaged in a violation of his parole and they simply took him and put him in a cell…”, Justice Jacob Wit stated during last week’s proceedings.
BELIZE CITY, Mon. May 23, 2022
The Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) handed down a decision last Friday quashing the decision of the upper courts in Belize which upheld the revocation of parole and subsequent incarceration of Hillaire Sears at the Belize Central Prison. He was first charged for murder in March 2001 and sentenced for manslaughter in December 2002, the following year. In December 2012, after serving 10 years he was granted parole and continued to work at the prison, managed by the Kolbe Foundation, up until April 2014, when he was detained and thrown in a cell following the Parole Board’s suspicion that he had violated one of the conditions of his parole (the use of cannabis).
He was detained for 55 days without an opportunity to plead his case to the Parole Board at the Belize Central Prison or magistrate, as is required under the regulations, and on May 28, the board informed him that a test of his urine sample confirmed the presence of cannabis and that his parole was revoked. Sears took his case to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the action on the grounds that it was to be brought as a judicial review application, and not a breach of constitutional rights claim.
The Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the Supreme Court, agreeing that the matter was brought via a wrong procedure, but the CCJ today set aside the judgment of its junior courts and issued a declaration that the nature of Sears’ re-incarceration was a breach of Section 5 of the Belize Constitution.
“The CCJ quashed the Parole Board’s order which revoked Mr. Sears’ parole and ordered that he be released from prison forthwith,” a release from the CCJ stated.
The state argued that clear proof of his parole violation, results of the urine test which confirmed the use of marijuana, “legally empowered” the Parole Board under the Prison Rules to revoke Sears’ parole. And while the Supreme Court dismissed the mandatory requirement that an oral hearing be granted to a parolee before the revocation of parole, Assistant Solicitor General, Samantha Matute-Tucker admitted that Sears should have had some sort of opportunity to plead his case but contended that it should have been by way of judicial review.
“I cannot shy away from that position that there ought to have been in this case, an opportunity for the appellant to at least explain why it is that the matter transpired that way that it did; however, in light of that submission considering the nature of the claim, when you look at the substance of the claim and what it is that the appellant is seeking, that is to be released forthwith and to have the decision of the parole board quashed, then we say it would have proper to have been brought by way of judicial review proceeding,” Matute-Tucker said.
But the CCJ focused on the fundamental breach of Sears’ right to personal liberty and equal protection under the law and determined that, according to the regulations, Sears should have been taken before a court before any decision was handed down against him, in essence, that the state had no legislative authority to re-incarcerate him.
Sears was represented by attorneys Leslie Mendez and Hector Guerra. He was not granted the damages he sought in the matter but was awarded the cost for the appeal before the CCJ and has likely already been released from the prison.