A man accused of breaking into the home of a 15-year-old girl and seriously sexually assaulting her at knifepoint is set to have his fate decided by a jury today.

The man is alleged to have committed the crimes during the night of January 19, 2005 after entering the home through a window, having removed an air conditioning unit.

According to the alleged victim, someone pulled her from her bed while she was asleep and had anal intercourse with her against her will — threatening to kill her if she screamed.

Neither she nor the 29-year-old defendant can be identified for legal reasons.

According to both Senior Crown counsel Paula Tyndale and defence lawyer Elizabeth Christopher, there is no dispute over the fact that the offences were perpetrated.

The question for the jurors is whether the accused man was responsible. In her closing remarks at Supreme Court yesterday, Ms Tyndale said there was compelling evidence that he was.

“This case is about doing justice to a young girl who was violated in the most humiliating way in her youth, at a time and in a place where she expected to feel most secure and where, you might think, you are most invulnerable — at home in the middle of the night in the quietude of sleep,” she said.

Ms Tyndale listed evidence from medics of the injuries the complainant suffered. She also cited evidence from a DNA expert, who said a swab taken from the exterior of the teenager’s vagina contained semen matching the DNA profile of the defendant.

The accused man is black, and Tricia Saul, a DNA analyst with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said Canadian and American population databases for the black population indicate that only one person in 100 billion would have such a DNA profile. Ms Tyndale said of Mrs. Saul’s evidence: “This is an extremely rare profile among the black population in two countries. There’s no Bermuda database, but she says she has no reason to believe that the Bermudian population would be any different.”

The accused man opted not to take the witness stand in his own defence.

However, Ms Christopher reminded the jurors that her client is presumed innocent unless they are convinced beyond reasonable doubt of his guilt, and they should not draw adverse inferences from the fact that he chose not to testify.

Claiming that the prosecution has failed to prove its case, Ms Christopher cast doubt on the way samples were handled prior to the court case.

She asked the jurors to consider whether the “chain of custody” of the exhibits — the way they were verified and labelled at each stage of the evidence gathering in Bermuda — was reliable or not.

Ms Christopher claimed there were “numerous errors” in this respect.

She also cautioned the jurors to be wary of the evidence of the DNA expert because her statistics on matches were drawn from the US and Canada, not from Bermuda where there may be closer family ties and therefore DNA links.

Ms Christopher said she did not understand why the Island does not have its own DNA database, and claimed that although she hesitated to use the word “inbred”, Bermuda has a relatively small community “where oftentimes people mix with each other”.

Therefore, she told the jury, the statistics on the likelihood of DNA matches are “irrelevant” as they cannot be said to apply to the Island.

The defendant has pleaded not guilty to burglary and serious sexual assault. Judge Carlisle Greaves is set to sum up the case this morning before sending the jury out to consider its verdict.