A jury has found two Donegal residents guilty of raping a student who they brought back to their flat after a night out drinking.
Boakye Osei (29) of Tooban, Burnfoot and Kelvin Opoku (33) of Cill Graine, Letterkenny had pleaded not guilty to rape of the woman in a town in the county in February 2015.
After a five-week trial a jury of seven men and four women took just over two hours to return unanimous guilty verdicts. Justice Alex Owens ordered a probation service report for both men and certified them as sex offenders.
He also ordered a victim impact statement to be prepared for a sentence date on January 13th next. He remanded the two Ghanaian nationals in custody to that date.
During the trial the woman, who is now aged in her 20s, testified that she had been out drinking with her friend in a local nightclub and she was drunk and finding it difficult to walk home.
She said the men were in a car and offered them a lift home. She said the men brought them back to a flat and offered them drink.
She told the jury she remembers lying on a bed and someone heavy on her and then something “inside her”. She said that the men swapped over and the second man raped her.
The woman said she was “blind drunk” and could not and did not consent to any sexual activity.
Osei denied any sexual activity between him and the complainant. When shown evidence that his semen was found on her underwear he replied “no comment”. His lawyers argued the semen traces could have come from cross-contamination.
Opoku told gardaí that he and the woman had sex which she consented to. He said he didn’t believe she was too drunk to consent.
Gardaí later showed him mobile phone footage taken by the victim’s friend in which the victim is staggering around the apartment and later falling on the bathroom floor, exposing her underwear, before the two men hold her up. Opoku said she wasn’t in that condition when they had sex.
He and the victim’s friend told gardaí that the victim was saying “harder” and moaning during the sex. Cross-examined on this the victim said she may have been dreaming and had a history of talking and moaning in her sleep.
“I was half way between sleep and drunkenness. I felt like I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know if it was a dream or it was actually happening. I was just so drunk,” she said.
“In terms of consenting, I in no way did consent to having sex with these men or to them touching me or coming near me in any intimate way.”