A YOUNG man who got into bed with another man’s girlfriend and sexually molested her while sleepwalking has been given a two-year supervision order.

Whenever he sleeps away from home for the next five years, Dale Kelly, 21, must tell everyone under the same roof he is a sexsomniac, or someone who can have sex while sleepwalking.

Judge Simon Hickey made the notification a condition of a five-year sexual harm prevention order.

He told Mr Kelly: “You do pose a risk to the victim and any female who might find themselves sleeping in the same household as you because as yet you have yet to undergo treatment.”

Mr Kelly must also register on the sex offenders’ register for the next five years, although he does not have a sexual conviction. The judge made the orders at York Crown Court after a jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity on Mr Kelly on a charge of sexual assault.

They had heard that the victim had gone to sleep with her boyfriend in a room a floor above Mr Kelly in a North Yorkshire house after all three had been out socialising.

She awoke to find Mr Kelly had got into the same bed and was sexually molesting her. He told police he didn’t know how or why he had done it.

Members of his family and friends gave evidence that he had sleepwalked in the past, and sleep experts for the prosecution and defence agreed he probably had sleep walked when he got into the wrong bed.

Mr Kelly, of Cleveland Place, Peterlee, County Durham, denied sexual assault.

The jury was given options of acquitting him, convicting him of sexual assault, or of finding he had committed the act but had been sleep walking. They chose the third option when they delivered their verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.

The judge said two doctors had decided Mr Kelly didn’t need confining to a psychiatric hospital.

He made a supervision order with conditions including helping him improve the way he sleeps and prepares for sleep.

The order will be supervised by the probation service.