Jurors returned "unreasonable" guilty verdicts in the trial of a "deranged animal", whose shock at an influencer's rape claim should have created doubt about his guilt, a court has been told.
Chidi Okwechime, a Conder construction worker linked to the Comanchero bikie gang, was sentenced in 2022 to more than five years behind bars for raping and choking a social media star in Coombs.
Acting Justice Stephen Norrish imposed the sentence in the ACT Supreme Court after a jury found Okwechime guilty of two counts of sexual intercourse without consent and a choking charge.
The jury acquitted Okwechime, 34, of two other charges laid over the same May 2021 incident.
More than eight months into his three-year non-parole period, Okwechime appeared in the ACT Court of Appeal on Wednesday to challenge his convictions and sentence.
His barrister, Bret Walker SC, focused heavily on the accounts of two people who were in a Coombs unit with Okwechime and the victim at the time the rape was found to have taken place.
They were a Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang member and his then-girlfriend, who had earlier spent hours "carousing", as Mr Walker put it, with Okwechime and the victim at Civic nightclubs.
The bikie said the walls in the Coombs unit, to which the group returned, were "paper thin".
Both he and his then-girlfriend said they had seen and heard nothing while the victim was at the unit to suggest Okwechime was raping her.
After the victim left the unit, having told Okwechime he had raped her, the 34-year-old spoke to the bikie.
The bikie said Okwechime was "panicking" as he told him: "This girl has literally just said that I raped her."
Mr Walker told the appeal court Okwechime had not been challenged at trial about the sincerity of this "protestation", leaving open the possibility it was genuine.
He argued the unchallenged evidence should have left the jury with a doubt about Okwechime's guilt, claiming the construction worker's "shock" at the allegation was consistent with his innocence.
"The man sincerely refuted the notion of rape," Mr Walker told the court.
But prosecutor Katie McCann argued the "protestation" evidence did not give rise to a reasonable doubt about Okwechime's guilt, telling the court the jury had been entitled to "put it to one side".
Ms McCann also urged the appeal court to dismiss Mr Walker's argument that a miscarriage of justice had occurred during Okwechime's trial.
That argument involves an assertion that Acting Justice Norrish failed to appropriately direct the jury in relation to certain evidence.
The other aspect of Okwechime's appeal involves his contention that Acting Justice Norrish made two errors in relation to his sentence.
Mr Walker and Okwechime's solicitors, from Hugo Law Group, claim the sentencing judge was wrong to find the choking of the victim lasted 15 seconds.
They also allege the penalty for one of the rape charges was "unjustly disproportionate" when considered alongside the punishment for the other.
In response, Ms McCann argued that was not the case.
The prosecutor also said the 15-second finding was consistent with the evidence given by the victim, who described Okwechime as a "deranged animal" during a police interview.
The appeal court, comprised of Chief Justice Lucy McCallum, Justice David Mossop and Justice Natalie Charlesworth, has reserved its decision.
If the appeal is dismissed, Okwechime will remain behind bars until at least June 2025.
