Unanimous not guilty verdict delivered in stabbing case
A man accused of a fatal 2020 stabbing has been cleared of a murder charge with a unanimous verdict.
Supreme Court jurors this afternoon found Davin Dill, 27, not guilty of murdering 22-year-old Joshua Rowse in an incident on June 14, 2020, and possessing a bladed article on the same date.
Mr Rowse died as a result of multiple stab wounds suffered in an incident outside the Rubis gas station on South Road in Warwick.
During the trial of Mr Dill, the court viewed CCTV footage from that gas station, which showed Mr Rowse and others arrive on bikes shortly after 7pm.
While Mr Rowse stood outside the store, a black car was seen to pull up and two men got out, one from the passenger’s seat and the other from the back seat on the driver’s side.
The men chased Mr Rowse around the side of the building and the black car followed behind. Seconds later, Mr Rowse was seen to walk back into frame, hunched over and holding his abdomen.
The court heard that Mr Rowse suffered 14 wounds, including one stab wound which went through part of the left ventricle of his heart and another that punctured his left lung.
Mr Dill’s case went before the Supreme Court earlier, in 2023.
However, the trial ended abruptly after Puisne Judge Juan Wolffe found the evidence cited by the prosecution came with “individual and collective weaknesses” and singled out the quality of the CCTV footage as poor.
After legal discussions, Mr Justice Wolffe said “There is no evidence whatsoever from any prosecution witness that they recognised any features such as eye or head features.”
He noted that a female witness who claimed she “could tell it was him” was someone who “had seen the defendant only in passing, and to whom she had never spoken”.
The judge added that the witness’s inability to point out particular features she could recognise “undermined her own testimony”.
Mr Justice Wolffe directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty on both counts and Mr Dill was acquitted.
However, the Crown subsequently launched an appeal against the decision, and on May 5 last year the Court of Appeal unanimously allowed the appeal, remitting the matter back to the Supreme Court for retrial.
The full judgment was not published to prevent possibly prejudicing the retrial.
A press summary provided by the court said: “The court decided that the case should have been left to the jury, but noted that the Crown presented its case in a different way to the way in which the case was argued before the trial judge.”
During the trial a witness, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, testified that she had viewed the CCTV footage and recognised one of the men who came out of the car as Mr Dill.
She said she knew Mr Dill from her school days and from seeing him around Warwick and recognised him in the video based on his body structure.
However, under cross-examination by Charles Richardson, for Mr Dill, the witness accepted that the video quality was not good enough to make out body structure.
Prosecutors also sought to tie Mr Dill to the car used in the attack, noting that he was seen driving the vehicle the previous morning.
Carrington Mahoney, for the Crown, said in his closing speech that the murder was a “gang-on-gang attack” during a time of “violent rivalry” between groups known as the Ord Road Crew and Jones Village Crew.
He said the two men had been “associates” of the rival gangs, but reminded the jury that this did not mean they were members.
Mr Mahoney said it was up to the jury to determine if the video quality was good enough for the witness to identify the defendant.
He also reminded jurors that police later chased down a car matching the description of the one involved in the murder, which a police witness said had Mr Dill on board.
After the occupants of the vehicle got out and ran off in different directions, the officer chased his target but lost him in the darkness.
However, Mr Richardson said the circumstantial evidence in the case was insufficient to prove Mr Dill had any involvement in the fatal stabbing.
He added that while the witness who identified Mr Dill in the CCTV footage might have believed that the man in the footage was the defendant, confident witnesses could still be “tragically” incorrect.
Mr Richardson said the witness had gone into the identification process “primed” to identify Mr Dill.
He told the court: “She wasn’t looking at the video to see who was there. She was looking to find a person she already decided was guilty.”
The jury found Mr Dill not guilty of both charges after under three hours of deliberation.
Acting Puisne Judge Paul Doherty thanked the jury for their service before releasing Mr Dill.
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