Nearly three years after Juan Carlos Novelo was found not guilty of the 2023 murder of his common-law wife Leslie Margarita Verde on the Caribbean island of Caye Caulker, High Court Justice Candace Nanton has publicly released a detailed 29-page written judgment laying out the legal reasoning behind her acquittal ruling.
In the newly published judgment, Justice Nanton confirmed that the court has no doubt that Verde was unlawfully killed. However, she emphasized that the prosecution, led by the Crown, failed to meet the critical legal standard of proving Novelo’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a core requirement for a criminal conviction in common law systems.
A central pillar of the Crown’s case against Novelo was testimony from Verde’s own daughter, who claimed to have witnessed Novelo assaulting her mother and later moving her body after the killing. But Justice Nanton identified significant, material inconsistencies between the daughter’s initial statement to responding police officers and the testimony she gave under oath during the trial. These irreconcilable discrepancies undermined the credibility of her account, leading the judge to reject key portions of her evidence.
With the daughter’s testimony ruled unreliable, the prosecution’s case rested entirely on circumstantial evidence, including surveillance video that placed Novelo at the couple’s residence during the time frame when Verde is believed to have been killed. However, the footage captured no actual act of violence that would link Novelo to the killing. Compounding this gap in evidence, medical examiners were unable to establish an exact time of death, leaving a critical ambiguity that could not be resolved to meet the standard for conviction.
In her conclusion, Justice Nanton emphasized that the accumulated circumstantial evidence did not form a solid, unbroken chain of proof connecting Novelo to Verde’s death. She also took care to clarify that the acquittal does not mean the court accepted Novelo’s version of events. Instead, the ruling was rooted solely in the prosecution’s failure to meet its burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a foundational principle of criminal justice that requires the benefit of the doubt to be given to the defendant when evidence is insufficient.