The man convicted of the cold case murder of US mathematician Scott Johnson has lodged an appeal, only days after he stunned his lawyers by pleading guilty.
Lawyers for Scott White, 50, lodged an appeal this week in the New South Wales court of criminal appeal against his conviction, Guardian Australia has confirmed.
The appeal marks another significant development in a death that was initially dismissed as a suicide by NSW police and had been subject to three coronial inquests, before being investigated by detectives as a gay hate crime with a $2m reward for information.
Johnson, 27, was found dead at the base of a cliff near Manly’s North Head in 1988. The area was a popular meeting spot for gay men.
In 2017, coroner Michael Barnes found Johnson fell from the cliff “as a result of actual or threatened violence” by people who attacked him over his sexuality.
Barnes criticised the initial police investigation as inadequate and found it likely more than one person ambushed Johnson.
Police launched a new investigation and announced the reward in 2018. White was arrested in May, 2020.
During a supreme court hearing on 10 January, White made the remarkable admission that he was guilty of murdering Johnson.
White’s publicly-funded lawyers immediately appealed his decision to plead guilty, arguing the plea should be vacated because of White’s cognitive impairment, his previous insistence he was innocent, his failure to tell lawyers he planned to change his plea, and his extreme agitation on the day of the hearing.
The integrity of the plea was so undermined that to hold White to it would constitute a miscarriage of justice, his lawyers argued.
As part of their submissions, his lawyers included the notes of a conversation they had in the cells with White immediately after he made the plea.
“I’m really sorry to all of you, I appreciate all your work, but I can’t handle it,” White said, according to notes taken of the meeting and the recollection of his legal aid lawyer, Louise Sutherland.
“If I get out she’ll just come after me again, I can’t do it, I just can’t, I’m sorry. I am better off in here. I’m safe in here. This is too much stress.”
The reference to “she” was clarified to be a reference to his former wife, who had been expected to give evidence against White.
“You told us before court you were going to say not guilty and you have told us consistently that you didn’t do it,” Belinda Rigg SC, White’s senior counsel and the NSW senior public defender, replied.
“I didn’t. I didn’t do it, but I’m saying I did it, you know what I mean. I’m saying that. 10 years, I’ll take that,” White said.
Rigg and White continued to speak, according to the file note, with Rigg telling White he would not receive a sentence as low as 10 years, and reiterating that a guilty plea meant he was “telling the whole world” he killed Johnson.
Rigg also reiterated that she was confident they would be able to prove that White’s former wife was not a reliable witness as she had been vindictive towards him, with White later saying she “took his kids” from him. White was asked what he would say if he was again asked to plead. “Not guilty,” he confirms.
White later signed legal instructions which read in part: “Today I was confused … I was stressed. I’ve had no food, no sleep, no shower. I saw the brother of the deceased in court. I saw police point at me … I maintain that I didn’t cause Scott Johnson’s death.”
In a decision handed down on 13 January, NSW supreme court judge Helen Wilson rejected the application to vacate the guilty plea. The application had been opposed by the prosecution.
In her decision, it was made clear that part of the evidence against White included recorded conversations he had with two undercover police operatives.
Wilson listed 12 matters she had considered as part of her decision, including that White had not raised his innocence in the conversation under the cells until it was mentioned by his lawyers, and that he had given considered reasons for his plea which had “a flavour to them of remorse for and acceptance of responsibility for Dr Johnson’s death”.
White had been found by multiple experts to be mentally fit to plead, and while Wilson agreed that he was cognitively impaired, either because of intellectual disability, alcohol-related brain damage, or a combination of the two, that was “immaterial for present purposes”.
“I accept that he functions socially and intellectually at a level well below that of most people in the community and he is thereby disadvantaged,” she found.
A spokesperson for the NSW public defenders confirmed submissions regarding the appeal were yet to lodged. White was expected to be sentenced in May.
