An Australian man was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison on Tuesday for the 1988 murder of an American who fell from a Sydney cliff that was known as a gay hangout.
The death of mathematician Scott Johnson was initially ruled a suicide, but his family pushed for further investigation. In 2017, a coroner found a series of assaults, some fatal, in which the victims had been attacked because they were thought to be gay.
Scott White, 51, pleaded guilty in January and could have been sentenced to life in prison.
Judge Helen Wilson said she did not find beyond a reasonable doubt that the murder was a gay hate crime, an aggravating factor that would have led to a longer sentence. She also said that she applied more lenient sentencing patterns in the state of New South Wales in the late 1980s.
He must serve at least eight years and three months in prison before he can be considered for parole.
White was 18 and homeless when she met the 27-year-old Los Angeles-born Johnson at a bar in suburban Manly in December 1988 and accompanied him to the top of a nearby cliff at North Head.
White’s ex-wife, Helen White, told police in 2019 that her then-husband had bragged about beating up gay men and said the only good gay man was a dead gay man.
She told the court Monday that her husband had told her that Johnson had run off the cliff. Scott White told police he was gay himself and was afraid his homophobic brother would find out about him.
Wilson said that it was not possible to draw any conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt about what had happened at the top of the cliff.
“The offender struck Dr. Johnson, causing him to stumble backwards and off the edge of the cliff,” Wilson said.
“In those seconds when he must have realized what was happening to him, Dr. Johnson must have been terrified, aware that he would hit the rocks below, and aware of his fate,” Wilson added. “It was a terrible death.”
Wilson did not accept defense attorneys’ argument that Helen White had been motivated to report him to the police for a reward.
During cross-examination Monday, Helen White denied being aware of an A$1 million ($704,000) reward for information on Johnson’s murder when she went to police in 2019. She said she only learned of a reward when the victim’s brother Steve Johnson doubled the sum in 2020.
White had a history of violent crimes before and after the murder, but had not committed a crime since 2008.
“It should be understood that the court is not sentencing a violent and reckless young man for an attack directed at a gay man,” Wilson said.
“Over time, the assailant is no longer the same angry young man who raised his fists at another on the edge of a cliff. Nor does the court impose a sentence for a hate crime on a particular section of society. The evidence is too scant to support that,” Wilson added.
She said a sentence for the same crime today would be “much higher.”
White’s attorneys have appealed his conviction and expect him to be acquitted of the murder charge in a jury trial.
A coroner ruled in 2017 that Johnson “fell from the top of the cliff as a result of actual or threatened violence by unidentified individuals who targeted him because they perceived him to be homosexual.”
The coroner also found that gangs of men roamed various locations in Sydney looking for gay men to assault, resulting in the deaths of some victims. Some men were also assaulted.
A coroner ruled in 1989 that Johnson had taken his own life, while a second coroner in 2012 was unable to explain how he died.
Johnson studied at universities in California and Cambridge in Britain before moving to Australia in 1986 to live with his Australian partner Michael Noone.
They lived in Canberra, where Johnson studied at the Australian National University, which posthumously awarded him a Ph.D. He was staying at Noone’s parents’ Sydney home when she died.
Reference-www.nbcnews.com