A SEX PEST who assaulted a student as she slept at a friend's home following a party has been jailed for the second time for a sexual offence.

A jury convicted Robert Michael Gray, 26, of the sexual assault on the student, aged 20, in September 2004.

The jury then heard that he had previously been jailed for 12 months and put on the sex offenders' register for three offences of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl, committed when she was 14 and he was 23.

Judge Jim Spencer QC told Gray that on each occasion he had taken advantage of his victim. Of the sex attack on the sleeping student, which took place at a house in Strensall, he said: "There is no mitigation for such an assault."

York Crown Court heard in April 2003, that Gray, whose girlfriend was pregnant at the time, had a ten-month affair with the teenager in 2002, when they repeatedly had sex in his car and his flat. He had also shared a double bed with the teenager during a secret weekend away in Scarborough.

Yesterday, car mechanic Gray, of New Road, Huntington, was jailed for four years, and his time on the sex offenders' register was extended from ten years to life.

Gray had denied sexually assaulting and sexually touching the student.

The jury at York Crown Court, sitting in Leeds, convicted him of the assault, but acquitted him of groping the student at a party earlier in the evening.

They heard how the student awoke during the attack in the early hours of September 25 and screamed "get him off" and "get him out". When Gray refused to leave the house where the 20-year-old had been sleeping, despite its occupant ordering him out, she fled into the night.

Gray went into the house's conservatory and slept there until police awoke him at 7am and arrested him.

Giving evidence at Leeds about the attack on the student, Gray claimed that she had flirted with him at the party and invited him into her bed. But the student told the jury that she had twice told him she did not want to do anything sexual with him and that he had followed her without invitation into the bedroom where she was sleeping.

Gray's barrister, David Hall, said he had lost his job because he had been remanded in custody awaiting trial.

Updated: 14:45 Friday, January 28, 2005