In the Sydney murder of Scott Johnson three decades ago, Scott Phillip White was jailed for 12 years.
As Justice Helen Wilson sentenced White for a maximum of 12 years and seven months on Tuesday, he didn’t react. He was given a non-parole period of eight years and three months in connection with the murder of the American mathematician in 1988, reported News.
The 51-year-old was convicted of Johnson’s murder after entering an “emphatic” guilty plea during a pretrial hearing in the New South Wales (NSW) Supreme Court in January.
A 2017 inquest had found his death was likely the result of a “gay-hate attack." Wilson said that White’s motivation for striking 27-year-old Johnson near the edge of a 60-metre cliff, causing the him to fall, could not be determined beyond reasonable doubt, The Sydney Morning Herald. She could not establish that there was any planning involved. She told the court, “That it was a gay hate crime is not a conclusion the court can reach to a criminal standard."
Meanwhile, White, who pleaded guilty to Johnson's murder, has come out as gay, reported news.com.au. This came after he routinely boasted about bashing “poofters” and telling his ex-wife that Johnson was a "dumb c**t" who ran off a cliff. White’s ex-wife Helen recently told the court that the couple first discussed the death of Johnson, whose naked body was found on rocks by a fisherman, after she saw a newspaper report about it. She said that she remembered asking White if "this was one of the gay men that he’d bashed and he said ‘oh that girly looking poofter’."
On Monday, Becca Johnson told the court that she was no mathematician like her late older brother. But she had calculated it was 33 years, four months and 22 days since her brother died. She said that during that time, White had the opportunity “to breathe, to hike mountains, to solve problems, to go for long runs in the sunshine, to love deeply, to have a family, to give back to the world. Those are years and opportunities that were extinguished for Scott.” While addressing White directly, she said, “You took Scott from the world”.
