KEY POINTS:
The jury hearing six sex charges against former Kiwi rugby league player Tea Ropati will resume their deliberations in Auckland District Court tomorrow.
The jurors retired at 1pm today to consider their verdicts and about 5.30pm indicated to Judge Phil Gittos that they would not be able to complete their task by tonight.
The judge acknowledged that they had had a tiring day and said they should adjourn at 6pm and return to court tomorrow morning.
The jury of seven men and five women asked two questions during the course of the afternoon.
The first was for an explanation of the law relating to charges of attempting to commit an offence.
The second, much later in the day, was a possible indicator that the jury was making slow progress.
They asked what procedure they should adopt in their deliberations and what order they should consider the charges.
Judge Gittos said such issues were up to them to decide.
Ropati, 42, has denied three charges of sexual violation, including one count of rape, and three charges of attempted sexual violation.
The charges arose from incidents at a Ponsonby bar and at Victoria Park in the early hours of June 15, 2006, involving a female complainant who was 36 at the time.
The Crown argued that Ropati took advantage of the woman, who was so intoxicated that she could not have consented to sexual activity with him.
The defence denied that a rape occurred because Ropati stopped short of having full sex with the woman as he felt guilty on account of his wife and that the sexual activity that did take place was consensual.
In closing arguments, defence counsel Gary Gotlieb asked the jury to consider how Ropati would have known that the complainant was in the state of intoxication that the Crown had argued she was.
He said Ropati would not have been aware that the woman had been drinking elsewhere for six hours before the pair met and Ropati had not plied her with alcohol in the bar.
He pointed to the testimony of one of her friends that she was "stringing her sentences perfectly okay" and to the fact that bar staff were happy to continue serving her.
Mr Gotlieb said the evidence showed the complainant was a woman who knew what she wanted.
She was not a teenager, but "an in-your-face young middle-aged person who knows her own mind".
"This is a woman who knows how to look after herself," he said.
"She's a big girl and she's embarrassed about what happened."
Crown prosecutor Phil Hamlin agreed that the woman had been flirting and laughing with Ropati in the bar.
But she later became sleepy and unresponsive when the pair went to a back room where some of the alleged sexual offending took place.
Mr Hamlin said all the evidence presented in court pointed to consent not being given.
The woman remembered being woken up by pain in Ropati's car in Victoria Park, where the alleged rape took place, and Ropati's "angry" face above her.
Mr Hamlin said injuries to her genital area showed blunt force trauma inconsistent with consensual sex.
- NZPA
