JURY members in the York garden rape trial were today considering their verdict.

Yesterday, self-confessed long-term heroin addict Phillip James Nicholas, 19, told them that a woman he barely knew had encouraged him to have sex with her on the ground by her front door.

He was giving evidence in his own defence.

The woman alleges he raped her as she returned home from an evening out with friends.

Nicholas, of no fixed address, denies the charge.

At York Crown Court, he said in the witness box that she had flirted with him when they met in a snicket shortly after midnight on July 8.

He had just phoned a drug dealer and was on his way back to the friend's flat where he and others had run out of heroin earlier that evening.

Nicholas told the jury the woman started kissing him in the street and they kissed along the road and up her front path.

He gave his account of how they had sex together.

As he gave her a goodnight kiss, he stole her purse from her handbag.

"There is no excuse for taking it," he said.

"I am a heroin addict. I needed money. It was opportunistic."

The woman alleges that he left her lying on the ground when she pulled his hair.

Nicholas said he had drunk about six shorts and other alcohol and had taken heroin in the hours leading up to the encounter.

He told the jury he had tried to run away from a police officer later that day because he had "failed to answer bail".

Giving the prosecution closing speech, John Elvidge told the jury: "Using your common sense, the only verdict in this case is guilty."

He said that Nicholas had been "smashed" on drugs and drink and his theft of the purse indicated his attitude towards the woman.

Defence barrister Taryn Turner told the jury to put aside feelings and to remember that the woman had not struggled, screamed or shouted.

She suggested the woman was crying rape because she was embarrassed about having sex in her front garden.

Updated: 08:24 Friday, January 11, 2002