When Kofi Dill was charged with handling a loaded gun in 2011, he assumed his conviction was a certainty.

Prosecutors said there was DNA evidence linking him, his 22-year-old girlfriend and others to the Rexio RJ Series .38 Calibre Special revolver, which had been found 20 metres east of his Pembroke home, in a drawstring bag.

He chose not to challenge that evidence, even though, as he claimed in an affidavit sworn this month, “I was not guilty of this offence”.

Mr Dill, who was described by police as a member of the 42 gang, said the female defendant “advised me, and I verily believed, that she was scared. She said she was pregnant and did not know what would happen if she were sentenced to jail”.

He added: “If I had had more money and was more sophisticated at the time when I was charged with this offence, I likely would have hired an expert to review the DNA evidence, write a report and fly in from overseas.

“I was not at all knowledgeable about DNA though and I was a poor Black man from the back of town.

“I believed we would both be wrongly convicted, so it was better that I do the time in prison than a young, pregnant woman.”

Mr Dill, who was aged 32 at the time and was represented by lawyer Charles Richardson, said: “I entered a guilty plea because I believed, no matter what the truth was, [that] the DNA evidence from an expert witness from the United States would be accepted over my word.

“She would say it was our DNA and we would say it wasn’t. If I were on the jury, I would have convicted us on her evidence.”

The expert who analysed the DNA on the gun was Candy Zuleger, of Florida-based Trinity DNA Solutions.

At the time, she was appearing frequently for the Crown as a witness at scores of Supreme Court trials and had set up the Bermuda Police Service’s DNA database.

But her methods, it has now been determined, were badly flawed.

Problems with her techniques were flagged up by a defence expert in another case involving the same Rexio revolver, soon after Mr Dill’s conviction.

Ms Zuleger continued to give evidence on the island until 2016.

It wasn’t until September 2022 that her methods came under renewed scrutiny, when a man jailed for life for murder and attempted murder, Julian Washington, added a fresh ground to his appeal against conviction.

Ms Zuleger had told a jury in 2014 that there was a 1-in-46 million chance that Mr Washington was not a possible contributor to the DNA found on the bullet casings near the murder scene.

The Death Penalty Project, a British charity that took on Mr Washington’s case, hired a DNA expert who concluded that Ms Zuleger’s evidence was “fundamentally flawed”.

An expert hired by the Crown agreed and Mr Washington’s convictions were quashed by the Privy Council last year.

Those findings prompted Cindy Clarke, the Director of Public Prosecutions, to launch a review of 273 cases involving Trinity DNA Solutions, which was completed in August.

It identified two more cases as involving flawed DNA evidence — Mr Dill’s and that of Anwar Muhammad, who had his 2012 convictions for attempted murder and using a firearm overturned in the Court of Appeal in June.

Mr Dill was the only one of the three to have pleaded guilty, leading to the highly unusual circumstance of a prosecutor asking the Court of Appeal earlier this month to overturn the conviction of a defendant who had admitted the crime.

Adley Duncan, for the Crown, said the evidence against Mr Dill was strong enough that, as a prosecutor, he would have pursued the case even without the DNA evidence.

Mr Dill remembered it differently. In his affidavit, he claimed: “The only evidence relied upon by the prosecution against me was DNA evidence.”

Ms Clarke, describing her review methodology in August, said forensic analysis was only done for cases in which it wasn’t certain that a jury or magistrate would have convicted without the DNA evidence.

In an affidavit for the Court of Appeal regarding Mr Dill’s matter, she said: “Numerous mistakes and omissions in the analysis and reporting of DNA profiles in this case have been identified to me, to the extent that I do not feel able to trust the reliability of the results produced by Trinity DNA Solutions in this case.”

Mr Dill was sentenced to eight years in jail in 2011. The case against the female defendant was dropped.

“I served the time, got out and left the jurisdiction as soon as I could to try to start over somewhere else,” he said in his affidavit. “Fortunately, I have done that successfully.”

Mr Dill, now 46, said he was unaware until his case was reopened this year that just a few months after he was jailed, another scientist disputed Ms Zuleger’s findings about the DNA on the revolver.

British expert Michael Appleby gave evidence for the defence at the trial of Noet Barnett, another 42 member, who was accused and ultimately found guilty of the attempted murder of Jeremiah Dill with the same gun that Kofi Dill was convicted of handling.

Ms Zuleger told the jury that Barnett’s DNA was found on the firearm, along with other people’s, but Mr Appleby said she looked at samples that were “unsuitable for meaningful comparison”.

He said when you test an item with DNA from multiple people on it, as in the Barnett case, you end up with “sub optimum” and “less than perfect” DNA to work with.

“All the profiles obtained [by Ms Zuleger] were incomplete, complex and mixed, indicating the presence of DNA from a number of individuals,” said Mr Appleby in December 2011.

“All the profiles were, in my opinion, for the most part, unsuitable for meaningful comparison and interpretation.”

He cited additional concerns that the DNA samples from multiple suspects in the case were “processed through the majority of the stages involved in DNA profiling” together in Ms Zuleger’s lab and that method would not be acceptable in Britain.

Mr Appleby said the results would be ruled inadmissible there due to the possibility that contamination had occurred.

Carrington Mahoney, the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, questioned Mr Appleby’s expertise and accreditation.

Barnett was represented by Victoria Pearman. Mr Richardson — Mr Dill’s lawyer in the firearm handling case — was second chair for Barnett’s defence.

Mr Appleby’s evidence was reported in the media.

Still, as he served his time in Westgate, it appears no one flagged up the circumstances of the case to Mr Dill.

Asked last week why Mr Dill wasn’t advised back then to consider an appeal based on Mr Appleby’s testimony for Barnett, Mr Richardson said he wasn’t instructed to speak on the matter to the press.

Mr Dill said in his affidavit that he only became aware of Mr Appleby’s analysis in Barnett’s matter when he read a report by Barbara Llewellyn, the forensic expert hired by the DPP for her recent review.

Last Friday, the Court of Appeal rejected the Crown’s request for Mr Dill’s conviction to be overturned.

Sir Gary Hickinbottom, in a written ruling, said Mr Dill appeared to have sought to do a deal with the authorities in 2011 whereby he “practically eliminated the risk of being prosecuted for far more serious offences committed with the firearm, entirely eliminated the risk of his pregnant girlfriend being prosecuted and exchanged the risk of a much higher sentence for the certainty of an eight-year custodial term by pleading guilty”.

He accepted Mr Duncan’s submission that if the DNA evidence had been ruled out as defective, the Crown would likely have proceeded with the prosecution, based on other evidence. That evidence included where the gun was found, a statement Mr Dill gave to police and testimony from a detective about Mr Dill’s involvement in gang and gun activity.

In a statement released after the judgment, Mr Dill had harsh words about the DPP’s review, describing it as “conducted behind closed doors” and proof of how “broken and selective justice in Bermuda has become”.

He noted: “To be clear, I did not seek a review of my case, nor did I apply to the Court of Appeal and never engaged any lawyer to do so.

“The process was initiated entirely by the Director of Public Prosecutions, who asked the Governor to refer my case.

“The Legal Aid Office later contacted me, not the other way around, and offered to represent me.”

Mr Dill called for the case of his brother, Jay Dill, who is serving a life sentence for the 2011 murder of Randy Robinson, to be reopened.

Kofi Dill said: “I pled guilty years ago, have served my time and moved on with my life but there are others in Bermuda who remain wrongfully incarcerated for crimes they actually did not commit who are being denied the opportunity to have their cases reviewed as a result of the faulty DNA evidence of Ms Zuleger and Trinity DNA Solutions, including my brother … who has maintained his innocence from day one.”

He added: “It breaks my heart that my brother continues to languish in prison for an offence he did not commit.

“It’s the DPP who continues to defend my brother’s conviction, when their own inquiry proves the evidence of Ms Zuleger was faulty and unreliable.”

Mr Dill alleged: “The same faulty forensic evidence that the Crown now discredits in my case is the very evidence that put my brother and others behind bars.

“It cannot be reliable in one case and unreliable in another.”

Ms Clarke explained in August that every case involving Ms Zuleger and Trinity DNA Solutions was looked at anew without reference to the DNA evidence “to determine the viability of the conviction against each suspect on each charge” and then reviewers “considered what the defence case was in assessing the prospects of conviction”.

She said if the conclusion was that the jury or magistrate would convict without the DNA evidence, then the conviction was considered safe.

It was reported last year that Jay Dill was seeking to appeal his conviction at the Privy Council, having failed at the Court of Appeal.

Ms Clarke declined to comment on Kofi Dill’s matter and Ms Zuleger could not be contacted.

• It is The Royal Gazette’spolicy not to allow comments on stories regarding court cases. As we are legally liable for any libellous or defamatory comments made on our website, this move is for our protection as well as that of our readers