The homicide case of Jeremey Sickenberger has been turned over to the jury of six men and six women after defense attorneys rested their case without calling additional witnesses or Sickenberger himself to the stand.

Attorneys gave their closing arguments in the case — once again painting two very different portraits of Sickenberger’s actions on April 17, 2014. It’s not in dispute that Sickenberger was holding a .22-caliber rifle which discharged and killed Thomas “T.J.” Stockman while the pair and two other friends were in the living room of Sickenberger’s Robbie Way mobile home.

What is in dispute is Sickenberger’s state of mind that evening, and by extension his legal culpability in Stockman’s death.

Defense attorney Joseph Smith once again assailed the prosecutors’ case for a murder conviction, acknowledging that Sickenberger’s conduct in pointing the rifle at Stockman was “reckless and grossly negligent” — the legal threshold for involuntary manslaughter — but did not rise to the level of murder.

“The Commonwealth cannot deliver what they promised,” Smith said. “There is no malice.”

Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger told jurors that Stockman’s own conduct during and after the shooting proved that he had “consciousness of guilt,” and that the very act of pointing a loaded firearm at a vital part of the human body constituted malice — a legal term referring to a particular state of mind that is required for a defendant to be convicted of murder.

He also characterized Sickenberger’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the shooting as calculated and intentional — witnesses testified that he went out on the home’s deck to call 911 and told the only eyewitness, Ashley Homison, to claim she did not see the shooting as calculated and intentional.