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Billy Mills was found guilty of a gun raid on a Royal Bank of Scotland branch in Partick, Glasgow, in May 2007, and given a 9 year prison sentence.
At the Court of Appeal in Edinburgh, judges acknowledged that new DNA evidence had emerged. The Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Gill, said: "The new evidence confirms all of our reservations about this conviction. We agree that there is clearly reasonable doubt. We conclude that there has been a miscarriage of justice and allow the appeal." The trial jury heard that a masked robber pointed a handgun at staff and customers in the raid on the bank on Dumbarton Road in Patrick. He demanded cash before getting away with £8,216. Mr Mills had denied the offence, claiming he was home at the time, and in his defence incriminated another man, convicted criminal Michael Absalom, for the robbery. Mr Mills' trial had relied on identification evidence from eyewitnesses and from police officers who viewed CCTV stills. But several witnesses also testified that the robber spoke with a foreign accent, with two saying he sounded South African. Following Mills' conviction fresh DNA evidence emerged linking South African, Absalom, to the raid. DNA matching his profile was found on door stop from the bank. Lord Gill said: "Even without this new evidence this was a prosecution that stood or fell by eyewitness identification alone. That is a form of proof that has been shown to be, in some cases, a dangerous basis for a prosecution, as history shows. "There was no forensic evidence of any kind against the appellant. The robber's face was partially masked." Absalom was jailed for 8½ years last year for robbing an American Express office in Hope Street, Glasgow, and an RBS branch in Troon, Ayrshire. Read more 'I couldn't believe it – I don't know how they came to a guilty verdict'It was 5.30am on June 7, 2007 when Mr Mills first heard the police dogs barking outside his tenement flat - the first in a long line of bizarre events that led to him being wrongly imprisoned for 12 months. "You don't expect anyone to come to your door at that time in the morning and I just couldn't understand it," he told Herald reporter Lucy Adams. "They grabbed me and threw me to the floor with my boxer shorts on. I remember thinking What the hell is going on? Why are they pointing guns at me and my family?' I thought they must be kidding on to start with. I thought it was because I'd forgotten to renew my car insurance." It was only once Mr Mills got to the police station that he was asked about and charged with an armed robbery on the Royal Bank of Scotland. The report in the Herald says that a door stop used by the robber to wedge open the bank's door contained DNA that did not match that of Mr Mills. The DNA report wasn't even included in the original list of evidence. On the 8th day of the 10-day trial the defence called a halt to proceedings because the doorstop was missing. It was only then that Mr Mills learnt of a DNA report stating that he did not match the DNA found on the doorstop. While on remand in Barlinnie another inmate suggested that he should speak to Michael Absalom, 38, a South African, who had been jailed for eight-and-a-half years for armed raids in Glasgow and Troon, Ayrshire, around the time of the Dumbarton Road raid. It was only at the prompting of Mr Mills and his lawyer, after the guilty verdict that the DNA sample from the doorstop was checked against that of Absalom. It tested positive. In fact, there was a 540 million to one chance of it coming from someone else. Click here to read the full account by Lucy Adams in |
