AUBURN – Jurors will resume their study of evidence this morning in Androscoggin County Superior Court as they try to decide if Jeremy Allen assaulted his son a day before the toddler died.

Allen readily admits spanking Nathaniel. The boy, a few days shy of being 22 months old, had refused to obey his mother’s instructions to pick up toys, Allen told jury members, and then had thrown a temper tantrum. Allen said he struck Nathaniel three times on his bare buttocks with a wooden spoon that night, Feb. 13, 2003.

He thought the discipline would get his son’s attention, he said, and that he might then be able to calm him down.

Allen, a 30-year-old Navy journalist, isn’t charged with causing Nathaniel’s death, but with assaulting a child. Bruises on the boy’s bottom led to the child abuse-related charge. They were discovered by doctors after Nathaniel was taken unconscious to a hospital suffering from a head injury the evening following the spanking.

Allen’s wife, Sarah, has been accused of shaking the boy with enough force to rattle his brain. She was tried for manslaughter in June, but a jury couldn’t reach a verdict. She faces retrial next month.

On Thursday afternoon, both Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese and Jeremy Allen’s defense lawyer, George Hess, rested their cases in the trial that opened Monday.

Jurors, after starting deliberations, asked to hear the testimony of an ambulance driver read to them, then returned behind closed doors to continue their work. They adjourned for the evening a little before 5 p.m.

First, though, Marchese finished her cross-examination of Allen, who had taken the stand in his own behalf Wednesday.

She repeatedly challenged Allen’s assertion that the spanking was in line with what he had learned from parenting books and questions, suggesting that he could have found other means to punish Nathaniel.

Allen countered the line of questioning by telling jurors, “I spanked him because I loved him.”

“Children need healthy boundaries,” he continued, that help to define relationships.

Both hugging and spankings, he maintained, “reinforce those boundaries.” Spankings, he said, were “part of my toolbox” of parenting skills.

Marchese, though, hammered away at Allen’s contentions, and pointed out the size disparity between father and son – 5 feet, 9 inches vs. less than 3 feet in height, and 195 pounds vs. 30 pounds.

Calling Allen frustrated and angry, she proposed to jurors that those emotions spilled out on the night of the spanking.

But Allen denied that.

“I enjoyed being a father,” he said.

After Allen finished on the stand, first Hess, then Marchese in rebuttal, called medical experts as witnesses to discuss the extent of Nathaniel’s bruises.

Hess’s expert, Dr. Arthur Weiss, a retired specialist in blood diseases, said Nathaniel developed an abnormality as a result of the trauma suffered the following day to his head. The condition, he said, prevents blood clotting and would have resulted in bruises appearing much worse than they would under more-normal conditions.

Dr. Eric Gunnoe, a staff pediatrician with Maine Medical Center in Portland, countered for the state that the bruises were consistent with child abuse, a specialty he’s studied both in Maine and elsewhere.

Following that testimony and both sides saying they had no further evidence to present, Justice Ellen Gorman explained the law to jurors, reminding them that in this case they must also decide if the state proved that Allen’s actions not only constituted assault on a child, but also went beyond the state’s provisions allowing parents to discipline their children. Reasonable corporal punishment, including spankings, are lawful in Maine.

Deliberations resume this morning at 9.