The conviction of Scott White in the decades-old death of Scott Johnson is drawing scrutiny amid concerns over covert tactics, ethical ambiguity and suppressed evidence, writes Dr Rosemary Sorensen.
DOES THE END justify the means? What if the end is not an end at all, just a convenience? Does it matter that a man is in gaol – and prefers to be there – for a crime that was proven through unreliable and unethical means?
When so much is unsettling our sense that justice is well served by democratic institutions, the case of Scott White, the man convicted of manslaughter 30 years after the death of Scott Johnson in Manly, does not seem urgent. And yet, the questions it raises are part and parcel of the crucial challenges to what now appears to be the complacent ethics that have rusted the core of societal value systems.
If we don’t feel, as one barrister is quoted as saying, “disquieted” by the implications of both the way White’s guilty plea was made and also the uncritical acceptance of the conviction based on that, are we guilty of accepting, as law professor Jeremy Gans puts it, a “satisfying resolution” because it’s convenient to do so?
Here's the case. And it’s complicated.
Let’s start with the first line from an ABC News report on 2 May 2022:
‘The ex-wife of a man who pleaded guilty to one of Sydney's most infamous gay hate murders says he often bragged about bashing homosexual men.’
The story was accompanied by an image of then 51-year-old Scott White in custody and a jubilant Steve Johnson, the brother of Scott Johnson, who had been found dead at the base of a cliff near Manly’s North Head in Sydney in 1988.
White was arrested by NSW police in 2020, following an undercover operation prompted by a tip-off by his former wife. The arrest also followed ‘three years of extensive reviews’ by Strike Force Parrabell into deaths between 1976 and 2000, which were suspected gay-hate crimes.
It appeared – and certainly reports such as that ABC one from May 2022 underlined – that something had finally changed. Finally, NSW police were taking the deaths of gay men as seriously as other homicides. Finally, after 30 years, Scott Johnson’s murderer was called to account.
Possibly. Or, as a new account of the Scott Johnson case suggests, possibly not.
Eren Orbey’s 13 October New Yorker article, formerly titled ‘Did a brother’s quest for justice go too far?’, follows on from – and quotes – law professor Jeremy Gans’ June 2023 article in Inside Story, ‘Scott’s Justice’.
Gans was interrogating the findings of the fifth judge who had presided over the case. He begins his interrogation by pointing out that every previous finding was ‘different, and none of the previous four [death by suicide, gay-hate murder] stood the test of time. Will the fifth? I’m not sure what I hope will happen’.
Tracing the story of the death of Scott Johnson from December 1988, when a body was found on rocks at Blue Fish Point, through to Judge Beech-Jones’ sentencing of White for manslaughter, Gans ended his essay pessimistically.
In light of the way White confessed to undercover police and because evidence from the undercover operation is not allowed to be published in Australia, Gans wrote:
‘Maybe there’s more evidence implicating White in the events of December 1988 than just his inconstant, vague, derivative say-so, and for some reason we just haven’t been told. I truly hope there is. But, if not, then I’m not willing to merely hope that this is fifth time lucky.’
It's that missing evidence that forms the basis of Eren Orbey’s New Yorker article. He was able to get access and publish outside the jurisdiction where the suppression is in place.
However, rather than further implicate White as Gans had hoped (for the sake of justice and the integrity of the courts), it throws more doubt over his guilty plea, his hesitant confession to the undercover agents that he pushed Scott Johnson and caused his fall and the fifth judge’s conclusion that finally the court has succeeded.
Orbey’s concern is highlighted in that headline: ‘Did a brother’s quest for justice go too far?’ The reports written here in Australia underlined Steve Johnson’s extraordinary tenacity and how he believed that his brother could not have killed himself, which forced the police and the courts to reopen the case time after time.
Orbey, speaking first to Steve, then to Scott’s partner at the time of his death, Michael Noone, discovered they were at odds over Scott’s likelihood of suicide:
‘The men’s opposing theories, murder versus suicide, became entangled in a rivalry over who had known and understood him best.’
Orbey then details how Steve wrote in a memoir about having been suspicious of several people, including one of the two fishermen who found the body. And he mentions the million dollars that Steve adds to the million already announced by NSW Police for information that would lead to Scott’s murderer, but, unlike the references in Australian media, he calls this a ‘fake additional million-dollar reward of his own money’.
This is now 2020, two years after the report recommending action from police to investigate gay-hate crimes previously dismissed. The review, which had begun in 2015, was ‘supported by the Homicide Squad’s Unsolved Homicide Unit’, according to the Strike Force Parrabell information provided by NSW Police — the same unit that had, in 2012, rated the Johnson case as having zero solvability.
An ABC report from September 2023 notes that a detective sergeant had conducted a review of the case and stated that ‘without developing further lines of inquiry’, the case could not be developed. The solution, according to this detective sergeant, was to target known persons of interest, which “may produce further lines of inquiry and enable covert opportunities to gather information”.
Both Orbey and Gans focus on this covert operation and the method used by the undercover police to extract a confession from Scott White.
Gans writes:
‘...no one has revealed what the cops did to prompt a fifty-year-old loner to confide “his biggest secret” – that he’d known he was gay since he was fifteen – much less detail that week’s “dream”.’
Orbey writes that White told the undercover police officer that he’d dreamed about being at North Head with Johnson and his story includes direct quotes from the interchanges, which, says Orbey, show how ‘scant and inconsistent’ White’s recollections were.
Orbey writes:
A psychologist who evaluated White for the defence told me that she’d worked on another Australian case involving a similar undercover strategy and found White’s case uniquely concerning for the “unrelenting psychological pressure” that it placed on someone who “didn’t have the capacity to deal with that pressure”.
A second barrister familiar with the proceedings said, of the initial judge’s uncritical acceptance of White’s guilty plea, “I don’t think I’ve seen a case that’s ever disquieted me the way this did”. Yet almost no media coverage has questioned the outcome, in part because the evidence has been inaccessible.
Clearly, the disquiet rankles. Rick Feneley, whose articles in The Sydney Morning Herald were important in bringing pressure to bear on the NSW police to acknowledge their failures and bias against LGBTIQ victims, told Torbey that “great dissatisfaction” remained.
As for the celebratory relief in LGBTIQ groups and the wider society that police prejudice was – as this case appeared to prove – being addressed, so far, while rewards of $100,000 each were announced for information about three of the cases recommended for review in the Strike Force Parrabell report, Scott White’s conviction appears to be unique.
Here’s the kicker: In the final paragraph of his article, Orbey writes:
‘A tragic irony of the case is that the person who is most sanguine about White’s conviction seems to be White himself.’
In Cessnock prison, White was sober and received medication, and he told Orbey that, through the reward money paid to his former wife for the information she gave police, he was ‘indirectly providing for his family’. Up for parole next year, ‘he explained he hoped to find a way to stay in prison indefinitely’.
When Jeremy Gans titled his Inside Story article ‘Scott’s justice’, he got it ambiguously and perfectly right.
Dr Rosemary Sorensen is an IA columnist, journalist and founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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