Two Murders Eighty Years Apart (2)

The murder of Stephen Lawrence on April 22, 1993 provoked an entirely different reaction. He was waiting for a bus with his friend Duwayne Brooks when they encountered a group of white youths who were clearly looking for trouble. Words were exchanged and one of them is said to have used the dreaded N word. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice; he was taken to hospital but was dead on arrival.

There were several witnesses to the murder but for the usual reasons. identifying and arresting suspects wasn’t easy. Eventually, six suspects were arrested but not charged. An attempt at a private prosecution failed, and of course the usual suspects had a field day playing the race card. There is though no credible evidence that Lawrence was murdered because he was black; rather he was the victim of a knife culture that is endemic among urban and suburban youth, white as well as black. This article from last year shows little if anything has changed since that fateful night in April 1993. That being said, anywhere you read about this case you will find the racial narrative being followed tirelessly.

Although to their credit, the parents of Stephen Lawrence gave the race hustlers short shrift, they turned on the police instead, accusing them of indifference if not outright corruption. This claim may not be entirely without merit; there is a suggestion that  the father of our of the suspects was able to direct the attention of detectives away from his son and had done something similar before, although in the absence of hard evidence, which is almost always impossible to obtain, this claim must be treated with reservation.

The government of the day commissioned an inquiry which led to a white paper by Sir William Macpherson. Published in February 1999, it made a number of recommendations that were not simply ludicrous but dangerous. Sadly, many have been implemented. One was the abolition of double jeopardy. The first prosecution under the new procedure was of Mario Celaire for the November 2001 murder of Cassandra McDermott. At present, leave must be sought from the Court Of Appeal before a second prosecution can be mounted, but desirable though it is to bring odious individuals like Celaire to book, this provision allows the state a second, perhaps even a third bite at the cherry, and is  a recipe for tyranny.

Other changes to the law following the Macpherson Report include the relentless obsession with race and the police recording of “non-crime hate incidents”. Rather than improve the efficiency of the police, this sort of nonsense has led to wasting countless hours of precious time that could have been spent investigating real crimes. The treatment of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull by Brighton police is a classic example of that. 

Back To Part 1.