Murder and military offences are capital crimes.

Murder and military offences are capital crimes. Belize is a British Independent Territory for which the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is the final court of appeal.
In 2001, Belize was one of the eleven states that signed an agreement to establish the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) to replace the Privy Council as the region’s final court of appeal.
Caribbean countries view the CCJ as the means to throw off the last vestiges of colonialism, but human rights groups have warned that the Court may be a hanging court.
The Caribbean Court of Justice was inaugurated in Trinidad on April 16, 2005.
Its establishment has been hindered by political disagreements. Several governments also have to amend their constitutions to switch to it.
In Belize a vote to replace the Privy Council with the CCJ is scheduled for July 2005. A majority of three-quarters of the House of Representatives House (twenty-two votes) is required for the constitutional amendment to pass. The opposition had initially supported the move, then withdrew its support in early 2005.
Up to December 2004 only six CARICOM member states: Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, St Kitts and Nevis along with St. Lucia, had actually decided to replace the Privy Council with the CCJ. Once convened, the court will hear everything from trade disputes to regular criminal and civil cases.
The setting up of the CCJ has been advocated in the region as a means of throwing off the last vestiges of colonialism by establishing full legal independence. Human rights groups have voiced concerns that the court will speed up the rate of hangings, following statements that appeared to be to this effect by political leaders in the region, frustrated by the Privy Council’s blocking of hangings. The rising crime in the region has prompted calls for governments to crack down on it, and some governments regional see hanging is seen as good way to appear tough on crime.
Belizean Prime Minister Said Musa claimed to be addressing the issue of violent crime in proposing the Belize Constitution Amendment Bill 2002. The Bill - shelved in 2003 - had proposed to remove the right of appeal to the Privy Council in the case of class A murders, punishable by the mandatory death penalty.
On March 11, 2002, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) had confirmed the April 2001 decision of the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal (ECCA) ruling that the mandatory death penalty was unconstitutional, and unanimously struck down the mandatory death penalty for murder in Belize and six other countries. The JCPC made one modification to the ECCA's ruling, saying that sentences should be set by a judge and not a jury. All death row cases in these countries had to be reviewed.
Since the 1993 Pratt and Morgan ruling by the Privy Council, the death penalty can not be carried out if the prisoner concerned has been under sentence of death for more than five years, in which case the sentence is automatically commuted to life imprisonment.
The last execution was carried out in June 1985, when Kent Bowers was hanged.
On December 18, 2008 and December 21st, 2010, Belize voted against the Resolution on a Moratorium on the Use of the Death Penalty at the UN General Assembly.