by William Ysaguirre (Freelance Writer)
BELIZE CITY, Thurs. May 15, 2025
William “Danny” Mason was found guilty in 2020 along with 4 other accused for the murder and beheading of Pastor Llewellyn Lucas on July 18, 2016, and he has since sought every avenue to have that conviction overturned; but his last and final appeal was denied by the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) on Tuesday, May 13.
The Court dismissed his application for an extension of time to apply for special leave in his murder conviction.
Mason became the prime suspect when Pastor Lucas’s head was found in a plastic bucket at the back of his pickup truck, but there was no direct physical evidence linking Mason to the crime. The prosecution’s case was largely built on circumstantial evidence, which included CCTV footage, witness testimonies, and forensic evidence.
Mason had appealed his conviction to Belize’s High Court, which dismissed his appeal last July 11, 2024, but the 21 days expired for Mason to file an application for special leave to appeal to the CCJ, when Mason’s attorney got sick after the judgement was delivered.
He eventually hired a new attorney, Peter Taylor from Trinidad and Tobago, who then filed applications on 5 November, 2024, to extend the time to apply for special leave to appeal, but this was already some 117 days after the High Court had handed down its judgment.
In evaluating the merits of Mason’s appeal, the CCJ felt the delay in filing the appeal had a legitimate explanation, and when the court considered that Mason’s attorney was hospitalized, that Mason had been behind bars while he tried to hire new representation, and that his new attorney was based in Trinidad, the court allowed that there was reasonable explanation for his delay in filing the appeal before the 21 days had expired.
The Honourable Justices Rajnauth-Lee, Jamadar, and Ononaiwu of the CCJ then considered whether Mason’s appeal had any realistic chance of success based on the issues he had raised as his proposed grounds for an appeal. These included the circumstantial nature of the evidence, the weight placed on certain prosecution evidence, and whether there was any procedural impropriety leading to double jeopardy, because Mason was prosecuted twice for the same offence; but they deemed that his appeal had no reasonable chance of success, given what the lower courts had already decided based on the evidence.
In the end, the CCJ upheld Mason’s conviction and sentence, concluding that there was no risk of a serious miscarriage of justice, and no disputable point of law of general public importance.