November 04, 2014

Court documents released this week reveal that a woman charged with sex offences against 11 and 12 year old boys is not guilty on the grounds of mental illness.

A NSW house mistress who was sentenced to five years imprisonment for sexually abusing boys as young as 11 and 12 has had her conviction overturned following an appeal, according to court documents released this week. Cassandra Leigh Johnson, 42, was sentenced to five years jail in 2011 for 18 sex assaults against the young boys who attended the school where she worked, but she was released from custody last year after launching an appeal on the grounds of mental illness.

Johnson met the young boys in the sick bay of the school on a number of occasions in 2009, where they had repeated oral and penetrative sex.

Experts disagreed

Two experts in Johnson’s original trial denied she suffered from bipolar disorder, however another found she did. The judge who retried the woman last year found her not to be responsible for her actions according to the newly-published verdict, which gave her a special verdict of not guilty on mental health grounds. One psychiatrist said Johnson was “superficial, she’s trite, she’s inauthentic, she’s vacuous, she’s psychologically illiterate, she’s emotionally illiterate.” However, he added, “She wasn’t that mad, that ill, that she didn’t know that [her interactions with the boys] were wrong, but … she dismissed it straight out of her mind and went forward with the sexual assaults”.

It was also summated that the woman’s father may have had bipolar disorder and that she had lived a ‘chaotic’ life.

According to the documents, the woman “acknowledged that she knew [the sex assaults were] wrong at the time, but claims she couldn't stop herself and that it was "an ego trip". She also said she “didn't see [the boys] at their age. It's the twisted thing".

Family members believed she was ill

Members of the woman’s family tendered statements to the court about Johnson’s state of mind throughout her lifetime. “On occasions you cannot disagree with her she just goes on like a lunatic screaming, crying and sometimes throwing things at you,” her husband said in a statement. Her daughter wrote of her relationship with her mother: “She was very easily offended and gets very upset over little things and cry in her room for hours over nothing very up and down in moods and say one thing one week then the next it was different never stuck to the same rules [SIC].”

Must comply with orders

Cassandra Leigh Johnson must comply with a number of conditions as part of her release, including continuing to seek psychiatric treatment and complying with AVOs.

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