A man 'vigorously' kissed an unconscious drunk at Piccadilly railway station, a court heard.
Richard David Bayley, 46, an M&S warehouseman from Wilmslow, forced himself onto his homeless victim at the end of a drunken night out.
A court heard his victim would never have known he had been molested if a railway station cleaner hadn't spotted the 2am attack.
Now Bayley has escaped jail after admitting a sexual assault.
A homeless man who had spent the day drinking alcohol decided to seek shelter at Piccadilly railway station on December 22, 2019, prosecutor Anthony Longworth told Manchester Crown Court on Tuesday.
"All he wanted to do was have a lie down on one of the stairs and sleep it off. He accepted he may well have passed out," said Mr Longworth.
At around 2am, a station cleaner went for a smoking break outside and he spotted Bayley who was 'struggling and clearly drunk'.
As the cleaner was returning to the station concourse, he noticed out of the corner of his eye what he thought was 'two men kissing', according to the prosecutor.
He noticed one of the two men involved was the defendant and the second was a homeless person 'who appeared be sleeping', said Mr Longworth.
"He saw that the defendant was kissing the other man vigorously with no response or movement (from the homeless man) who was just asleep," said the prosecutor.
The cleaner said the defendant was 'pushing his face into the man who was sleeping and it was not a gentle kiss'.
The defendant was applying 'a lot of pressure' for a few seconds but the homeless recipient of the kiss 'didn't even appear to know it was happening', the court was told.
The homeless man was 'either deeply asleep or unconscious through drink', said Mr Longworth.
The cleaner alerted security who called police and Bayley was arrested. He later told officers he didn't know what he had been doing.
In a victim impact statement referred to in court, the victim said: "No-one has the right to touch me without consent."
Damian Zelazowski, defending, said his client had worked as a warehouseman for M&S for 23 years.
Bayley had one previous conviction for indecent assault in January 1997 when he was a juvenile.
Judge Anthony Cross QC said that without the intervention of the railway station cleaner the victim 'would never have known he was the victim of a sexual assault'.
Bayley, of South Close in Wilmslow, was handed a 12-month community order after he had earlier admitted one charge of sexual assault. He must also carry out ten days of rehabilitation activity and sign the sex offenders' register.
He was also ordered to pay £500 compensation to his victim and £500 towards prosecution costs.
Judge Cross said the offence wasn't so serious that it required a jail sentence and he added: "I'm satisfied this was a drunken aberration."
He went on that the sentence may have different if his victim had woken up but that the offence had had only lasted 'a couple of seconds'.
