Perth-born cricket player Alex Hepburn, who is imprisoned in the bedroom of his team-mate for raping a sleeping woman, has lost his offer from the British Court of Appeals to overturn his conviction.
The 24-year-old was jailed for five years in April last year for the attack that took place in a Worcester apartment in 2017 on the first night of a sexual conquest contest that he helped create a WhatsApp group.
A jury had found Hepburn guilty of verbal rape when the trial was resumed the same month, but exempted him from another number of rapes related to the same victim.
During the trial, the ex-Worcestershire all-rounder was referred to by the prosecutor as “fired” to sleep with most women before he raped his home on Portland Street, Worcester on April 1, 2017.
Hepburn contested his conviction before the appeals court earlier this month.
In a judgment delivered on Tuesday, three senior judges, including Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett, dismissed his appeal and said, “The conviction is not uncertain.”
At the hearing before the Court of Appeals, Hepburn’s lawyers argued that the messages submitted to the jury did not show that he was willing to have sex with a woman without consent.
Many of the messages related to a game between Hepburn and a number of others to have sexual encounters, the court was told.
Hepburn’s attorney, David Emanuel QC, said: “The idea propagated by the Crown that he desperately wanted to win the game this year so that he would ignore the true consent if he had to, is simply not going into anything News or by supporting the fact of the game itself. “
Emanuel said to the judges: “I accept that it would be different if sex was spoken against the will or tricks to score a point or take a risk, but there is no such thing in the news.
“You are too far away to deal with the facts of the alleged crime.”
Miranda Moore QC, representative of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), argued that it was correct that these WhatsApp messages were heard during the process.
She told the court that “at some point this was not a bit of a kid’s joke,” but “a deep-seated, long-standing game between a number of professional athletes.”
Judge Jim Tindal, who arrested Hepburn at Hereford Crown Court on April 30 last year, told the cricketer that he and a former team-mate, Joe Clarke, had agreed to a “miserable sexist game after a similar stunt to increase the number of sexual encounters possible to collect “previous year.
In comments to the WhatsApp chat group, the judge said: “You probably thought it was bad behavior at the time.
“In truth, it was bad sexism.”
PA ldj
30-06-20 1952
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