The Marie Davis murder trial jury will not be kept together overnight after it begins to consider its verdicts some time tomorrow.
Justice Lester Chisholm made his ruling today on the 14th day of the trial of Dean Stewart Cameron in the High Court at Christchurch, on charges of raping and murdering the Papanui 15-year-old.
When he announced his decision he repeated the warning he had given to the jury at the start of the trial that they must not discuss the trial with anyone outside the jury.
New legislation gives judges the discretion to decide whether a jury should be kept together and stay overnight together at a hotel with court staff escorting them, or be allowed to return to their homes at night.
The defence closed its case after one final witness today, and then crown prosecutor Chris Lange gave his two-hour closing address to the jury. The defence closing will be tomorrow morning and then Justice Chisholm will sum up before the jury retires to consider its verdict.
The last of the defence evidence was testimony from forensic pathologist Professor Rex Ferris who disagreed with some of the findings of crown pathologist Dr Martin Sage.
He did not agree that Marie's body could have drifted 5km down the braided streams of the Waimakariri River from Groyne 56 - the Crown says the body was wrapped and put in the water there early on April 6 last year - without receiving injuries along the way.
"I cannot recall any case of a body being flushed down a river for a considerable distance without some kind of evidence of that on the body," he said. In his opinion, the body entered the river close to where it was recovered.
Cross-examined, he agreed that the fact that there was no sign of predation by eels or seagulls indicated that the body had been protected in some way, such as being wrapped up.
In his closing address to the jury, Mr Lange said that the lack of signs of predation on the body after it had spent 11 days in the river meant that it had been wrapped, and may have come loose from the bundle of bedding when that had been spotted in the river about two days before.
This showed that the defence contention that Marie could have entered the river naked as a result of accident or suicide, possibly after a sexual encounter on the riverbank, could be ruled out.
He reminded the jury that there had been no sign of forced entry to Marie's house in Morrison Avenue on the night she disappeared. Cameron, a 39-year-old road worker, was known to her because he was related to a friend of hers, and Marie had stayed over with her friend the previous night at the house where he lived.
He said it seemed she must have let someone she knew into the house.
Spots of Cameron's blood were found on the floor of the study where she had been using the computer that night, and his DNA was found in semen on swabs taken from her body.
There was no evidence to link anyone else to the crime, which he believed the defence would suggest.
There was also no evidence that Marie was at any risk of suicide.
"She was not a troubled girl as the defence portrayed her. She was a relatively normal 15-year-old girl," he said.
The pathologists had agreed that the cause of death was "anatomically unascertainable" but Dr Sage had suggested that one possible mechanism was the so-called "sleeper hold" with an elbow crooked about the neck which caused unconsciousness by cutting off the flow of blood through the carotid artery.
Mr Lange pointed out that there had been evidence by a witness, a former police officer, that Cameron had once demonstrated the use of this carotid hold.
He said if the jury found that Marie had died while Cameron was facilitating the crime of sexual violation or trying to avoid detection after the offence, they should convict him of murder.
