A trial that Judge Charles Zambito expected to last four days stretched into a fifth day today with two-and-a-half hours of closing arguments by the two attorneys before the jury was given a chance to deliberate.
Deliberations didn't last long and David K. Atkinson was convicted of criminal sexual act in the first degree.
Atkinson was on trial for forcing a woman he was living with into performing oral sex on him.
It was an act he recorded live and streamed for a man living in Darien whom he apparently suspected of getting involved with the woman. This was apparently supposed to show the Darien man that the woman was still with Atkinson and staying with him.
Jamie Walsh, an attorney with the Public Defender's Office, represented Atkinson and argued that the sexual act was entirely consensual and that Atkinson and the woman had been cuddling before she agreed to perform the act and that she took her shirt off.
The incident started after Atkinson found text messages on the woman's phone between the woman and the man in Darien. This act was supposedly "makeup sex."
There was disagreement between the defense and the prosecution as to how a mobile phone came to be destroyed by a clawhammer and how Atkinson's guitar came to be used as a weapon against the television set in the residence.
Assistant District Attorney Robert Zickl said there was nothing about the event that suggested it was consensual, that the woman felt threatened and forced to perform the act. He said although the video is dark, the woman clearly still had her shirt on, and the language of Atkinson hardly fits his definition of "romantic." Besides, Zickl noted, it seemed odd that a man who claimed he had just been cuddling with his woman and was now getting a consensual and romantic sexual favor, still had his boots on and his pants buckled.
