On this
date, 22 April 1993, a Black British man by the name of Stephen Lawrence was
murdered in Eltham, South East London, England in a racist attack. Let us not
forget him and those other victims who were murdered in the United Kingdom. Let
us unite to end racism. We got the information about him from Wikipedia.
 |
|
Stephen Lawrence
|
Born
|
13
September 1974
Greenwich District Hospital, London, England |
Died
|
22
April 1993 (aged 18)
Well Hall Road, Eltham, South East London, England |
Cause of
death
|
Blood
loss due to stab wounds
|
Resting
place
|
Clarendon,
Jamaica
|
Ethnicity
|
Black
British
|
Citizenship
|
British
|
Education
|
Blackheath
Bluecoat Church of England School
|
Occupation
|
Student
|
Known for
|
Victim
of racist murder
|
Parents
|
Neville
Lawrence
Doreen Lawrence |
Stephen Lawrence (13 September
1974 – 22 April 1993) was a Black British man from Eltham, south east London,
who was murdered in a racist attack while waiting for a bus on the evening of
22 April 1993. Witnesses said he was attacked by a gang of white youths
chanting racist slogans.
After the initial investigation, five suspects were arrested but not
convicted. It was suggested during the course of that investigation that the
murder was racially motivated and 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. A public inquiry was held in 1998, headed by
Sir William Macpherson, that examined the original Metropolitan Police Service
(MPS) investigation and concluded that the force was "institutionally
racist". It also recommended that the double jeopardy rule should be
abrogated in murder cases to allow a retrial upon new and compelling evidence;
this became law in 2005. 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'. The then-Home Secretary Jack Straw commented
in 2012 that ordering the inquiry was "the single most important decision
I made as Home Secretary". In 2010 the case was described as being
"one of the highest-profile unsolved racially-motivated murders".
On 18 May 2011, following a cold case 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 and substantial evidence" becoming
available. 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. 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.
A jury was selected on 14 November 2011, and the trial started on the
following day. On 3 January 2012, Dobson and Norris were found guilty of
Lawrence's murder, and were sentenced on 4 January 2012 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". The sentences would
have been far longer but the crime had been committed many years previously and
before adulthood, requiring sentencing as juveniles according to the law as it
stood at the time of the murder.
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