Jury deliberating in case of sex attack on 81-year-old Rohnert Park woman

<p>Jurors began deliberations Thursday in the case of a convicted sex offender accused of sexually assaulting an 81-year-old Rohnert Park woman and returning eight months later to try again.</p><p>Paul Vernon Sullenger, 46, had admitted the attack but was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea because of a technical error related to his past conviction in Texas.</p><p>Sullenger got a new lawyer and requested the jury trial that has been underway two weeks. He faces a life prison sentence if the jury returns guilty verdicts on the six felony counts.</p><p>On Thursday his attorney, Kevin McConnell, and prosecutor Tania Partida made closing arguments.</p><p>Partida said the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Sullenger crept through a window of the victim's Enterprise Drive apartment Nov. 2, 2008, held a pillow over her face and committed oral copulation.</p><p>The woman testified that Sullenger threatened to kill her if she told police. He returned June 20, Partida said, but couldn't get in the same window because the woman had secured it with a dowel.</p><p>“The defendant may have thought, ‘I can get away with it once, I can get away with it another time,'” she told jurors.</p><p>Sullenger was arrested about three months later after DNA evidence collected in the first attack matched samples in a federal database. Other evidence included Sullenger's fingerprints collected from a patio chair in the second attempt.</p><p>McConnell argued in his closing that Sullenger was too drunk to form the required mental state for a conviction on certain counts. And McConnell said there was no physical evidence to corroborate the woman's account of the sexual contact.</p><p>“She was in a high-stress situation. Her vision was obscured,” McConnell said. “Is it possible she could have been mistaken in this regard?”</p><p>But Partida argued Sullenger's stealth and efforts to silence the victim proved he was not too intoxicated to form “specific intent.”</p><p>Jurors were not informed of Sullenger's past admissions or his prior history. He was convicted in 1994 of a sexual assault in Houston.</p>