Murder of Stephen Lawrence

Stephen Lawrence (13September 1974 – 22April 1993) was a black British teenager from Plumstead, southeast London, who was murdered in a racially motivated attack while waiting for a bus in Well Hall Road, Eltham on the evening of 22April 1993, when he was 18 years old.

The case became a cause célèbre: its fallout included changes of attitudes on racism and the police, and to the law and police practice.

It also led to the partial revocation of the rule against double jeopardy.

Stephen Lawrence was born in Greenwich District Hospital on 13September 1974 to Jamaican parents who had emigrated to the UK in the 1960s.

His father is Neville Lawrence, then a carpenter, and his mother is Doreen, then a special needs teacher.

Brought up in Plumstead, South-East London, he was the eldest of three children, the others being Stuart (born 1976) and Georgina (born 1982).

During his teenage years, Lawrence excelled in running, competing for the local Cambridge Harriers athletics club, and appeared as an extra in Denzel Washington's film For Queen and Country.

At the time of his murder, he was studying technology and physics at the Blackheath Bluecoat School and English language and literature at Woolwich College, and was hoping to become an architect.

Lawrence had spent the day of 22April 1993 at Blackheath Bluecoat School.

After school, he visited shops in Lewisham, then travelled by bus to an uncle's house in Grove Park.

He was joined there by his friend Duwayne Brooks, and they played video games until leaving at around 10:00pm.

After realising that the 286 bus on which they were travelling would get them home late, they decided to change for either bus route 161 or bus route 122 on Well Hall Road.

Lawrence and Brooks arrived at the bus stop on Well Hall Road at 10:25pm.

Lawrence walked along Well Hall Road to the junction of Dickson Road to see if he could see a bus coming.

Brooks was still on Well Hall Road, between Dickson Road and the roundabout with Rochester Way and Westhorne Avenue.

Brooks saw a group of six white youths crossing Rochester Way on the opposite side of the street near the area of the zebra crossing and moving towards them.

At or just after 10:38 pm, he called out to ask whether Lawrence saw the bus coming.

Brooks claimed that he heard one of Lawrence's assailants saying racial slurs as they all quickly crossed the road and "engulfed" Lawrence.

The six aggressors forced Lawrence down to the ground, then stabbed him to a depth of about 5 in on both sides of the front of his body, in the right collarbone and left shoulder.

Both wounds severed axillary arteries before penetrating a lung.

Lawrence lost all feeling in his right arm and his breathing was constricted, while he was losing blood from four major blood vessels.

Brooks began running, and shouted for Lawrence to run to escape with him.

While the attackers disappeared down Dickson Road, Brooks and Lawrence ran in the direction of Shooters Hill.

Lawrence collapsed after running 130 yd; he bled to death soon afterwards.

Jack Straw said that ordering the inquiry was the most important decision he made during his tenure as home secretary from 1997 to 2001.

A 1998 public inquiry, headed by Sir William Macpherson, examined the original Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) investigation and concluded that the investigation was incompetent and that the force was institutionally racist.

The publication in 1999 of the resulting Macpherson Report has been called "one of the most important moments in the modern history of criminal justice in Britain".

It also recommended that the double jeopardy rule should be repealed in murder cases to allow a retrial upon new and compelling evidence: this was effected in 2005 upon enactment of the Criminal Justice Act 2003.

Such an appeal had only become possible following the 2005 change in the law, although Dobson was not the first person to be retried for murder as a result.

Such claims had surfaced before, and been investigated in 2007, but were reignited in 2013 when a former undercover police officer stated in an interview that, at the time, he had been pressured to find ways to "smear" and discredit the victim's family, in order to mute and deter public campaigning for better police responses to the case.

An inquiry into whether members of the police force shielded the alleged killers was set up in October 2009.

In 2010, the case was said to be "one of the highest-profile unsolved racially motivated murders".

On 18May 2011, after a further review, it was announced that two of the original suspects, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were to stand trial for the murder in the light of new evidence.

At the same time it was disclosed that Dobson's original acquittal had been quashed by the Court of Appeal, allowing a retrial to take place.

Two of the perpetrators were convicted of murder on 3January 2012.

After the initial investigation, six suspects were arrested but not charged; a private prosecution subsequently initiated by Lawrence's family failed to secure convictions for any of the accused.

It was suggested during the investigation that Lawrence was killed because he was black, and that the handling of the case by the police and Crown Prosecution Service was affected by issues of race.

On 3January 2012, Dobson and Norris were found guilty of Lawrence's murder; the pair were juveniles at the time of the crime and were sentenced to detention at Her Majesty's pleasure, equivalent to a life sentence for an adult, with minimum terms of 15 years 2 months and 14 years 3 months respectively for what the judge described as a "terrible and evil crime".

In the years after Dobson and Norris were sentenced, the case regained prominence when concerns of corrupt police conduct during the original case handling surfaced in the media.

Although further inquiries in 2012 by both Scotland Yard and the Independent Police Complaints Commission had ruled that there was no basis for further investigation, Home Secretary Theresa May ordered an independent inquiry by a prominent QC into undercover policing and corruption, which was described as "devastating" when published in 2014.