Concerns grow over ethics behind Scott Johnson manslaughter plea

Dr. Scott White’s conviction in the decades-ago death of Scott Johnson has come under scrutiny amid concerns about undercover tactics, ethical ambiguity and suppressed evidence, writes Rosemary Sorensen.

Does the END justify the means? But what if the end is not actually a goal, but merely a convenience? Does it matter that a man is in prison for a crime proven by untrustworthy and unethical means and chooses to be there?

While it so disturbs our sense that justice is well served by democratic institutions, Scott WhiteThe plight of the Manly man convicted of manslaughter 30 years after Scott Johnson’s death does not appear urgent. And yet the questions it raises are part and parcel of the crucial challenges to what appear to be complacent ethics that have corroded the core of social value systems.

If, as one lawyer put it, we do not feel “troubled” by the consequences of both the uncritical acceptance of White’s guilty plea and the conviction based on it, are we guilty of accepting it as law professors? Jeremy Gans Are you calling it a “satisfactory solution” because it is convenient to do so?

Here’s the thing. And it’s complicated.

Let’s start with the first line from one ABC News report On May 2, 2022:

‘The ex-wife of a man who pleaded guilty to one of Sydney’s most notorious gay hate murders says he bragged about beating gay men.’

The story was accompanied by a photo of Scott White, 51, who was then in custody, and Scott Johnson’s brother, Steve Johnson, who was found dead at the bottom of a cliff near Manly’s North Head in Sydney in 1988.

White was arrested by NSW police in 2020 following an undercover operation tipped off by his ex-wife. Arrest also followed ‘comprehensive three-year reviews‘ Deaths of suspected gay hate crimes by Strike Force Parrabell between 1976 and 2000.

Eventually it became clear that something had changed, and the reports certainly had, as stated in ABC’s May 2022 report. Finally, the NSW police were taking the deaths of gay men as seriously as other murders. Finally, after 30 years, Scott Johnson’s killer has been called to account.

Probably. Or probably not, as a new account of the Scott Johnson case suggests.

Eren Orbey13 October New Yorker previously titled article ‘Has a brother’s quest for justice gone too far?’continues and quotes law professor Jeremy Gans’ June 2023 article Inside Story, ‘Scott’s Justice’.

Gans was questioning the findings of the fifth Supreme Court judge who presided over the case. every previous finding in question ‘different and none of the previous four [death by suicide, gay-hate murder] has stood the test of time. Will it be fifth? I’m not sure what I expected to happen.’.

Tracing the story of Scott Johnson’s death from December 1988, when a body was found on rocks at Blue Fish Point, to Judge Beech-Jones‘ Gans, who sentenced White for involuntary manslaughter, ended his article on a pessimistic note.

In light of White’s confessions to the undercover police, and because evidence from the undercover operation was not permitted to be published in Australia, Gans wrote:

‘Perhaps there is more evidence than White’s inconsistent, vague, derived statements to implicate him in the events of December 1988, and for some reason we have not yet been told. I really hope there is. But if it’s not, then I don’t want to hope it’s a fifth time by luck.’

This missing evidence forms the basis of Eren Orbey’s claim. New Yorker article. He was able to access and publish outside the jurisdiction where the suppression was implemented.

But instead of further implicating White as Gans had hoped (for the sake of justice and the integrity of the courts), his confession of guilt casts further doubt on his hesitant admission to undercover agents that he pushed Scott Johnson and caused him to fall, and the fifth judge’s eventual decision that the court succeeded.

That headline highlights Orbey’s concern: ‘Has a brother’s quest for justice gone too far?’ Reports written here in Australia have highlighted Steve Johnson’s remarkable tenacity and how he believed his brother could not kill him; This forced the police and the courts to reopen the case multiple times.

Speaking first to Steve and then to Michael Noone, Scott’s partner at the time of his death, Orbey discovered that they had disagreements about the possibility of Scott’s suicide:

‘The men’s opposing theories (murder or suicide) became embroiled in a competition over who knew and understood him best.’

Orbey then details how Steve wrote in a memoir that he suspected many people, including one of the two fishermen who found the body. And he mentions the million dollars Steve added to the million announced by the NSW Police for information leading to Scott’s killer, but contrary to references in the Australian media, this ‘Fake million-dollar additional prize with his own money’.

It’s now 2020, two years after a report recommending police action to investigate gay hate crimes was previously rejected. The review, which started in 2015, ‘Supported by Homicide Unit’s Unsolved Homicide Unit’according to Attack Power Parrabell Information provided by NSW Police; The same unit whose solvability of the Johnson case was rated zero in 2012.

One ABC report It notes that from September 2023, a detective sergeant reviewed the case and stated: ‘Without developing further lines of research’The case could not be developed. The solution, according to this detective sergeant, was to target known persons of interest. “can create further lines of investigation and provide covert opportunities to gather information”.

Both Orbey and Gans focus on this undercover operation and the method the undercover police used to extract a confession from Scott White.

gans writes:

‘…no one has ever explained what the cops did to encourage a lonely fifty-year-old man to reveal his ‘biggest secret’ that he had known he was gay since he was fifteen, let alone the ‘dream’ of the week.’

Orbey writes that White told the undercover officer that he dreamed of being at the North Head with Johnson, and his story includes direct quotes from those conversations. ‘inadequate and inconsistent’ White’s recollections were as follows.

Orbey writes:

A psychologist assessing White for the defense said he had studied another Australian case involving a similar covert strategy and found White’s case uniquely worrying because of the “relentless psychological pressure” it placed on someone “who lacked the capacity to cope with that pressure”.

A second attorney familiar with the hearings said of the first judge’s uncritical acceptance of White’s guilty plea: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case that bothered me this much.” But almost no media coverage questioned the outcome, partly due to lack of access to evidence.

Clearly, unrest is growing. Rick Feneleyarticles Sydney Morning Herald Torbey, who said they were important in pressuring NSW police to admit their failures and bias against LGBTIQ victims, said “huge dissatisfaction” remained.

Scott White’s conviction appears unique, given that police bias in LGBTIQ groups and the wider community (as evidenced by this case) has so far been addressed, and a reward of $100,000 each has been announced for information on three cases recommended for investigation in the Strike Force Parrabell report.

Here is the striking point: In the last paragraph of his article, Orbey writes:

‘A tragic irony of the case is that the person most optimistic about White’s conviction appears to be White himself.’

White was sober and on medication in Cessnock prison and told Orbey that he too was being treated through reward money paid to his ex-wife for information she gave to police. ‘He indirectly provides for his family’. I’m up for parole next year ‘He announced that he hoped to find a way to remain in prison indefinitely’.

When Jeremy Gans took his title Inside Story article ‘Scott’s justice’he got it vaguely and completely right.