Counsel for a man accused of a 2020 murder called on a jury to find his client not guilty, arguing that the case against him had been built on tainted witness evidence.

Charles Richardson, the defence lawyer for Davin Dill, said that while a witness had claimed to identify his client on CCTV footage from the scene of the crime, the recording was of poor quality and cropped by police to focus on specific people in the shot.

He said: “The prosecution’s case against Davin Dill doesn’t rest on DNA. It doesn’t rely on fingerprints on a bloody knife. It doesn't rely on a confession.”

He further suggested that the witness, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, had formed a belief that the defendant was the culprit because of “street rumours”.

Mr Richardson told jurors that the witness went into the identification process “primed” to look for the defendant.

He said: “This was a box-ticking exercise. She wasn’t looking at the video to see who was there. She was looking to find a person she already decided was guilty.”

Mr Richardson added that, despite claiming to identify the person in the video as Mr Dill based on his body structure, the witness also agreed that the video quality was too poor to make out body structure.

He said the witness told the court that she “knew of” Mr Dill because they were of the “same generation” and that she had seen him around from time to time.

He added that while the witness might believe that the man in the footage was the defendant, confident witnesses could still be “tragically” incorrect.

Mr Richardson noted that the jury had heard that in a previous trial, a police witness had identified the defendant in a video recorded weeks before the murder, only for it to be revealed that Mr Dill was in hospital at the time.

He said: “If it had not been for the evidence that he was in the hospital, where would he have been?”

Mr Dill, 27, has denied murdering 22-year-old Joshua Rowse and possessing a bladed article, specifically a knife, in a public place on June 14, 2020.

Earlier in the trial, the court witnessed CCTV footage from the Rubis gas station on South Road in Warwick, 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, with the black car following 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, included one stab wound which went through part of the left ventricle of Mr Rowse’s heart and another that punctured his left lung.

Mr Dill was arrested that night after running from officers in Warwick.

Carrington Mahoney, for the Crown, told the jury that a web of circumstantial evidence in the case pointed at the defendant’s guilt.

He said: “Each bit of evidence may be nothing, but when you put it together, you can see part of the whole puzzle.”

Mr Mahoney reminded the jury of a witness close to the deceased who had identified the suspect as Mr Dill based on his height, build and skin tone.

He called the murder a “gang-on-gang attack” during a time of “violent rivalry” between groups known as the Ord Road Crew and Jones Village Crew.

Mr Richardson, however, said that while Mr Dill was associated with ORC, the jury could not convict him on the basis of the company that he kept.

He also argued that while Mr Dill did attempt to escape arrest, it did not mean that he was guilty of murder, stating that he had active warrants for traffic matters at the time.

He added: “Fleeing is not an admission of murder. Young men in Bermuda run from police all the time for all sorts of reasons.

“They saw the police, they ran. Simple as that.”

The trial continues.

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