Justice Antoinette Moore Retires After Twelve Years on the Bench

She came to the bench for six months and stayed for twelve years. In 2014, attorney and human rights advocate Antoinette Moore accepted what was supposed to be a short-term appointment to help reduce a backlog of criminal cases before the Supreme Court. But that temporary assignment became a defining chapter in Belize’s judiciary. At the end of August, Justice Moore will retire from the High Court, leaving behind a career shaped by fearless advocacy, complex financial crime prosecutions, and some of the most consequential criminal trials in the country’s history. Tonight, Shane Williams reflects on the legacy of a jurist whose influence has been felt not only in the courtroom, but across the wider pursuit of justice.

 

Shane Williams, Reporting

For more than ten years, Justice Antoinette Moore has handled some of Belize’s toughest criminal cases. But before she took the bench, she was already known as a fierce human rights attorney. Trained at Loyola University Chicago and Oxford, Moore spent much of her private practice defending constitutional rights and standing with vulnerable communities. Her most lasting work from that period was in the fight for Maya customary land rights.

 

Antoinette Moore, Attorney for MLA (File: April 22, 2015)

“That is what you have been struggling for and that certainly… That has gone for the last ten years through the courts, through the regional human rights bodies, through the courts of Belize and until now it reached the last, the highest, that mountaintop in terms of the courts, the highest court.”

 

Moore also took on another complex challenge as lead prosecutor for the Financial Intelligence Unit. She successfully prosecuted what was then Belize’s largest money laundering case, securing convictions against Michael and Melonie Coye and others in a prosecution involving more than one-point-five million dollars in laundered funds.

 

Antoinette Moore, Prosecutor, Financial Investigation Unit (File: August 8th, 2012)

“We are very pleased that the jury saw the evidence and resulted in guilty verdicts for all five of the accused, which of course includes the corporate accused and the four natural persons.”

 

In 2014, Antoinette Moore was asked to take on a temporary role as a Supreme Court judge in the criminal division. The job was straightforward: spend six months helping to clear more than seventy pending cases. But six months turned into twelve years. During that time, Justice Moore became one of Belize’s most respected criminal judges, presiding over some of the country’s most high-profile and closely watched cases.

 

Justice Moore sentenced William “Danny” Mason and four accomplices to life imprisonment for the brutal kidnapping, murder and beheading of Pastor Llewellyn Lucas, one of the most sensational cases in Belize’s history.

 

She also imposed life sentences on Enrique DePaz for the murder of Harrison Bowers, Shane Bennett for the murder of Anthony Parks, Wilmer Escobar for the double murder of sisters Cresencia and Josephine Oh, Nicholas Swazo for the murder of Gerald “Shiny” Tillett and Christopher Bradley for killing Martha Gonzales.

 

In 2023, she sentenced former police corporal Kareem Martinez to eighteen years in prison for the manslaughter of fourteen-year-old Laddie Gillett, a case that drew national attention and renewed scrutiny of police use of force. Justice Antoinette Moore’s career has been defined by service in nearly every corner of Belize’s justice system: as advocate, prosecutor, educator and judge. Shane Williams for News Five.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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