A man accused of murder has been cleared of all charges by a jury after a trial lasting more than a month.

Davin Dill, 24, faced a charge of murdering 22-year-old Joshua Rowse along with possessing a bladed article, specifically a knife, in a public place on June 14, 2020.

The victim died at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital after he was attacked and stabbed that evening by two men outside the Rubis petrol station on South Road in Warwick.

The case relied heavily on two witnesses saying they could identify the accused from CCTV video footage.

The jury also heard a claim that Mr Dill had taken part in a threat to the victim’s parents on May 29, which was caught on a Ring security camera.

However, yesterday, Puisne Judge Juan Wolffe said the evidence cited by the prosecution came with “individual and collective weaknesses” and singled out the quality of the CCTV footage as poor.

An imaging consultant told the trial that the footage from the gas station’s security cameras, showing a car approaching the victim and a man purported to be the accused getting out of the back, had “insufficient resolution to get fine detail and insufficient contrast”.

Witnesses for the prosecution had claimed to recognise Mr Dill from tattoos in the footage.

However, the consultant said the video was such that “one could not make out any tattoo or marking” on whoever had been caught on camera.

The jury had also heard that the witnesses recognised the accused based on “body structure” in the footage.

Mr Justice Wolffe ruled: “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”.

On the claim that Mr Dill took part in the confrontation with the victim’s parents, Mr Justice Wolffe said the jury had been told that the defendant had been injured and admitted to hospital days before the incident took place, and was not discharged until June 11.

The jury was told by a police officer that it was possible for the defendant to slip out of the hospital and come back.

However a doctor told the trial that Mr Dill had a tube placed in his chest, and that “the suggestion he was able to leave hospital and go to the residence is absurd”.

The doctor called it “highly unlikely” and said it “would have been highly dangerous to his health”.

Mr Justice Wolffe said that at the close of the trial he was called upon to assess the evidence and had concluded a jury could not find the defendant guilty.

He directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty on both counts, and Mr Dill was acquitted.

Cindy Clarke, the Director of Public Prosecutions, told The Royal Gazette that an appeal was “being considered”.

A spokesman for the Bermuda Police Service said: “In light of the decision handed down by the courts in this matter, the Bermuda Police Service will consult with the Department of Public Prosecutions to determine what the next course of action should be.”

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