A TV investigation will re-ignite the Stephen Lawrence scandal, says robert chesshyre
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Two years ago the police and Crown Prosecution Service decided that they were unlikely to secure a conviction of the killers of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death in 1993 at a south London bus stop because of his race.
In effect, they threw in the towel, allowing the five young white men widely suspected (and publicly accused) of the murder to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Justice, it seemed, in this most high profile of killings, would never be done.
On Wednesday the young men's peace of mind may be shattered by reporter Mark Daly, whose undercover film The Secret Policeman exposed racism in the Greater Manchester force. After a year on the trail, he claims to have turned up new evidence about the suspects' alibis as well as allegations about police corruption.
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| The case has haunted the Metropolitan Police since the first bungled inquiry |
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The Lawrence murder is the case that will not go away. It has haunted the Metropolitan Police since the first bungled inquiry, through serious suggestions of gross police incompetence highlighted by the Macpherson Inquiry. Macpherson decided that the cause of the police failure lay in "institutional racism". In other words, detectives took less care because Stephen was black, and they believed - that as in other similar killings - no one of any consequence would complain or notice.
It was a supreme misjudgment, largely because Stephen's parents, Neville and Doreen, pursued the case with terrier-like determination. If Daly has managed to establish facts that eluded a series of police reinvestigations and also to stand up sustainable allegations of police corruption, it will not just be the five suspects who sleep less easily on Wednesday, but also, perhaps, a few detectives.
FIRST POSTED JULY 21, 2006
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