Met officers deny sharing ‘grossly offensive’ messages with Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens

Two Met Police PCs and a former officer have pleaded not guilty to allegations of sharing “grossly offensive” messages with Sarah Everard’s murder Wayne Couzens.

PC Jonathan Cobban, 35, PC William Neville, 34, and ex-officer Joel Borders stood together in the dock at Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday morning to deny the criminal charges.

The case centres on WhatsApp messages on a group chat which were sent on six dates between April and August 2019.

The court heard the defendants dispute that the messages were “grossly offensive” instead of simply “offensive”, and the officers are due to argue about their intentions at the time of sharing on WhatsApp.

Prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward said evidence will be presented at trial on the officer’s police training and background.

“They should have known the content of the material they were exchanging was grossly offensive, that’s the point of the evidence”, explained Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring.

Asked to outline the defence case, barrister Nicholas Yeo said: “Whether or not the messages were ‘grossly offensive’ rather than ‘offensive’.

“Secondly, whether or not the defendants had the mens rea to either intend to be grossly offensive or to be aware of that fact.”

Couzens, part of the Met’s Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection unit, is serving a whole life sentence for the kidnap, rape, and murder of Sarah Everard in March last year.

Borders, from Preston, and Cobban, from Didcot in Oxfordshire, both denied five charges of sending by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, or menacing message or matter.

Neville from Weybridge, Surrey, pleaded not guilty to two identical charges.

The Crown Prosecution Service initially withheld the names of the three defendants, claiming it was for “operational reasons”, before their identities were revealed the following week

A trial in the magistrates court will take place over two days on July 28 and 29.