An appeals court in Australia has overturned a conviction made earlier this year of a man who’d admitted murdering the gay brother of a local man in an apparent anti-gay hate crime back in 1988.
For over 30 years, Steve Johnson of Cambridge, Mass. sought justice for his brother, Scott, then traveling in Australia. As Boston Spirit writer Mark Krone reported for us back in 2015, “On December 10, 1988, Scott Johnson’s body was found at the bottom of a cliff in [the New South Wales beach town of] Manly, his clothes neatly folded nearby, his wallet missing.” Since the late 1970s, the rocky spot had been a place where “roving male teenagers (and some girls) made ‘poofter bashing’ a rite of passage” and where some 80 men had died or disappeared.
Earlier this year, the case appeared to have been closed, with a confession and a conviction.
According to the Boston Globe:
Scott White, 52, was sentenced in May to 12 years and seven months in prison for the murder of 27-year-old mathematician Scott Johnson.
White had surprised his lawyers by pleading guilty to murder during a pre-trial court hearing in January.
About 20 minutes later, White signed a statement saying that he had been “confused” when he pleaded guilty, had not caused Johnson’s death, and wanted to plead not guilty.
White, who has an intellectual disability, explained to his lawyers that he had pleaded guilty due to stresses including seeing the alleged victim’s Boston-based brother Steve Johnson in court.
The older brother had offered his own $1 million reward for information leading to the prosecution of Scott Johnson’s killer months before White’s arrest in 2020.
Three judges of the New South Wales state Court of Criminal Appeal in Sydney on Friday ruled that White should have been allowed to reverse his guilty plea, quashing his conviction and sentence.
The judges said there was a question about White’s culpability for murder that could have been raised in a trial. A trial could have resulted in his acquittal or conviction of the lesser crime of manslaughter.
The murder charge will be considered by the New South Wales Supreme Court on Dec. 1 when White is likely to plead not guilty.
Steve Johnson, who flew to Sydney for White’s two-day appeal last month, accepted the court’s ruling.
“Whatever lies ahead, we’re ready for it,” he said in an email.
“A lot of people are working very hard on this case — no one wanted a rush to judgment or a reckless conviction of anyone for this crime,” he added.
“White faces a potential life sentence if convicted again,” according to the Globe, and that “New South Wales is still coming to terms with the era when Scott Johnson died. Violence against LGBTQ people in Sydney was widely tolerated in the last decades of the 20th century.
“The state government announced this month an inquiry into unsolved deaths resulting from gay hate crimes between 1970 and 2010.”
Read the complete Boston Globe story here.
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