The fate of one of New Zealand's highest ranking police officers and two of his former colleagues remains uncertain this morning with a jury resuming its deliberations on whether they are guilty of historic sex charges.
Suspended assistant police commissioner Clint Rickards, 46, and ex-police officers Brad Shipton,48, and Bob Schollum, 54, have pleaded not guilty in the High Court in Auckland to kidnapping and indecently assaulting a then 16-year-old girl between November 1983 and August 1984.
The jury of eight men and four women began deliberating at 2.30pm yesterday, and retired for the night at 9.30pm.
They were due to resume deliberations at 9am today.
The woman says when she was 16 she was taken screaming and struggling to a bedroom in a Rotorua house, handcuffed to a bed and indecently assaulted with a bottle by the three policeman.
The men all claim she is lying about the attack and Rickards has said he did not even know the girl.
While summing up the case to the jury Justice Judith Potter told them to consider each charge separately and the case of each of the accused men separately.
She said they had to consider whether the complainant was telling the truth and be satisfied she had correctly identified each of the men.
She told them what they may have heard outside the courtroom about the trial was "utterly irrelevant".
The charges carry maximum jail terms of seven years for indecent assault and 14 years for kidnapping.
The men are the same three who were acquitted in March last year of raping Rotorua woman Louise Nicholas, also in the 1980s.
