Successful Submission of No Case to Answer in Cold Case Murder

A murder trial was halted at the close of the prosecution case when the Judge ruled that DNA evidence linking the defendant to the scene was insufficient to found a guilty verdict. The deceased had sustained fatal injuries in the course of a burglary of his home in Northampton in 2015. Extensive investigations failed to find the perpetrator(s) of the murder. In 2020, a DNA sample recovered from the window frame through which the burglars entered the property was randomly compared to the national DNA database by a cold case investigations team. It showed a match with the defendant such that the chances of it being the DNA of an unknown person rather than the defendant were in the order of one in a billion. The defendant lived in East London at the time of the murder and there was therefore no apparent innocent reason for his DNA being found at the scene.

Following cross-examination at trial, all three prosecution expert witnesses agreed that scientific analysis was unable to demonstrate whether the DNA was more or less likely to have been left by means of primary rather than secondary transfer. A consequent submission of no case to answer made by Tim Moloney QC was successful and the jury returned not guilty verdicts on the direction of the Trial Judge.

Tim led Nan Mousley and was instructed by Nadeem Thanvi of ITN solicitors.

Further details can be found here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-56915233