A 32-year-old salesman has been found guilty by a Central Criminal Court jury of assaulting a woman causing her harm in Cork.
But the jury failed after five hours deliberations on day six of the trial to reach a verdict on a charge of raping the woman on the same occasion.
Mr Justice Paul Butler sent the jury to a hotel overnight and the two women and nine men will resume consideration of the rape charge tomorrow.
The accused has pleaded not guilty to both charges arising out of incidents that occurred in April 2002.
He told his counsel, Mr Patrick McCarthy SC, that the woman had chatted him up in the early hours of the morning when they came across each other on the street and had consented to "full-on" sexual activity with him.
He told Mr Alexander Owens SC, prosecuting, in cross-examination on day four of the trial, that he had not had sexual intercourse with her. Their intimacy, he said, had been confined to what he described as "full-on sexual activity" and simulation of sex.
He denied that she had been drunk and he had taken advantage of her intoxication when he saw her on the street. "She was coherent and she chatted me up," he told Mr Owens.
The 27-year-old woman had told Mr Owens earlier that she was walking home along the street in the early hours of the morning when a man attacked her, dragged her into a back garden of a house and raped her.