25: The Murder of Stephen Lawrence

This week we are exploring the racist murder of 18 year old Stephen Lawrence in London in April 1993. This case dominated headlines throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s, as it brought the institutional racism at the heart of London’s Metropolitan Police into the spotlight and led to a huge investigation into police conduct.

It would be easy for us to not do this case or any other hate crimes and just keep on doing other cases, but this is important and we aren’t willing to just pay lip service to working against racism, we want to try to positively contribute to the conversation in the best way we can. While also making space for black and other ethnic minority voices.

Stephen Lawrence was born in London on September 13 1974, the eldest of three children born to Jamaican parents Neville and Doreen. Along with his younger siblings Stuart and Georgina he was brought up in Plumstead, South East London. Stephen was a talented runner and represented the local Cambridge Harriers athletics club. He also excelled in school and at the time of his death he was studying English Language and Literature, Physics and Technology. He was planning on going to university and wanted to become an architect.

But all that changed on Thursday April 22 1993.

On April 22 1993 Stephen had left school as usual and after going to the shops he took a bus to Grove Park, a neighbourhood in South East London, to visit an uncle. He was joined at his uncle’s house by a friend, Duwayne Brooks. They hung out at the house playing video games until about 10pm when they left and boarded the 286 bus. However, upon realising that the 286 bus would get them home too late, they decided to change buses and got off the 286 on Well Hall Road, and waited for either the 161 or 122 bus, both of which would get them home quicker than the 286 they were originally on.

The pair got to the bus stop on Well Hall Road at 10.25. The bus was late so Stephen walked down the road to the junction with Dickson Road to see if he could see a bus coming, then turned around and walked back towards the bus stop. Duwayne waited at the bus stop.

But before Stephen could return to the bus stop, at approximately 10.38pm, a group of young white men crossed the road and surrounded him, shouting racial epithets.

The group hit Stephen with what looked like an iron bar but later turned out to be a butcher’s knife and he fell to the ground, this initial hit with the knife cut Stephen to a depth of five inches through his left shoulder and punctured his lung. Another stab cut through his right collarbone, severing his auxiliary arteries. It was all over in less than one minute.

Duwayne later said that had they known the bus would be so late they would have just jogged home, because they weren’t that far away from home, only a couple of miles.

The pair ran towards Shooters Hill, with Stephen managing to run 120 metres before he collapsed in the road, his attackers ran in the opposite direction. Pathologist Richard Shepherd later said that it was testament to Stephen’s physical fitness that he was able to run over 100 metres with a punctured lung having just been stabbed repeatedly. Duwayne shouted at passersby that they needed help but nobody stopped to help them, so he ran to find a phone to ring 999 and a passing off duty police officer stopped and laid a blanket over Stephen. Remember that, he laid a blanket over him, he did not carry out first aid, he did not try and stop the bleeding.

The ambulance arrived soon after and Stephen was taken to Brooks General Hospital at 11.05pm, but by that time he had already bled to death.

Along with Stephen’s friend Duwayne, three other witnesses at the bus stop all said that the attack had been sudden and short, and none of them were able to identify the murderers. One of the witnesses said she thought that Stephen was okay because he got up and ran away. Within 24 hours of the murder several local residents came forward to police with the names of the attackers, two anonymous notes were also found, one on a police car windscreen and one in a phonebox, with the names of members of a local gang who had killed Stephen, and there had been 26 anonymous tip offs with the names of the attackers.

The same five names kept popping up: Gary Dobson, Neil Acourt and his brother Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight and David Norris.

Four of the five youths were already known to police for being violent white supremacist pieces of shit and were linked to a number of racist knife attacks or attempted knife attacks in Eltham, South East London.

Just four weeks before Lawrence’s death, Gary Dobson and Neil Acourt were involved in a racist attack on a black teenager, named Kevin London, whom they verbally abused and attempted to stab. Neil’s brother Jamie was accused of stabbing black teenagers Darren Witham in May 1992 and Darren Giles in 1994, because spoiler alert they were still walking the streets a year later, and this attack caused Darren Giles to have a heart attack. The stabbings of Gurdeep Bhangal and Stacey Benefield, both of which happened in March 1993, in Eltham, were also linked to Neil and Jamie Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson.

While the police were taking their sweet time not doing anything, protests had begun, just like we have seen this year following the murder of George Floyd. And this one took place outside the BNP headquarters in Welling South London, not far from where Stephen was murdered. For those outside the UK or those too young to remember the BNP the British National Party are a far right facist political party. I actually thought they were now defunct but they are still around although they have no seats in the House of Commons. They spew hatred and sew divisions, mainly about racism and immigration. Duwayne was arrested for damaging a BMW, although he wasn’t arrested until October 1993.

Family Liaison Officers were sent to the Lawrence home but Neville and Doreen would later say that police weren’t really interested in what had happened to their son but what connections he had to criminals or gangs or drug dealing. Spoiler alert: none. Police really didn’t want to do any work that involved tackling racism, they just wanted to close this case by saying Stephen and Duwayne were drug dealers and drug dealers kill each other. They even claimed that Stephen had been burglarising houses because a pair of gloves were found near the crime scene, and that was the only possible reason a black teenager would have to have a pair of gloves. They also took names and details of all the family’s friends and anyone who came to the house so members of the local community who just wanted to offer condolences, see if they could help in any way, community activists, everyone, in an attempt to find anyone who knew the family who had criminal connections.

His parents were so upset and angry that the FLOs were trying to paint Stephen as a thief and a drug dealer that they threw them out of their home.

Remember earlier when we said that the off duty officer who stopped just put a blanket over Stephen while he bled out in the middle of the street? Well, that officer later claimed that he didn’t know Stephen had been stabbed multiple times, it was dark and Stephen was wearing lots of layers. The stab wounds were five inches deep, and they weren’t discovered until paramedics attempted to move Stephen. On duty police arrived before the ambulance and still not one of them had checked if Stephen was breathing, he was lying in a pool of his own blood but they still maintained they couldn’t tell if he had any injuries. They were only concerned with Duwayne’s involvement in the attack.It was later revealed that they believed it was a drug related attack and that Duwayne was the perpetrator. They had decided this was two black gangbangers who had fought over a drug deal and one killed the other. The police also theorised that the racist term the group shouted at Stephen before they stabbed him was a nickname. Yes, you heard that correctly, the Metropolitan Police asked if a group of white youths known in the area in connection with multiple racist attacks might have been calling Stephen the N-word because that was a nickname they had for him.

Neville and Doreen were vocal in their criticism of the Met Police and the glacially slow movement of the investigation.

Two weeks after the murder, Nelson Mandela came to Britain, and he met with Neville and Doreen Lawrence, and spoke with them about Stephen’s murder, about the lack of police action, or even the police caring that a black teenager had been murdered by a gang of white teenagers. And then, Nelson Mandela spoke to the international media about Stephen’s murder, and this is when the case went from being a small local story about a teenager being murdered, to being a huge national news story. The very next day the first arrests were made.

The Acourt brothers and Gary Dobson had been arrested. David Norris turned himself in a few days later, and Luke Knight was arrested on June 3.

Duwayne had picked Neil Acourt and Luke Knight out at identity parades as being two of Stephen’s murderers and on June 23, the pair were charged with murder.

But the relief of Stephen’s loved ones and the local communities didn’t last long as on June 29, the pair were released with all charges dropped. The Crown Prosecution Service cited lack of evidence as the reason, stating that Duwayne wasn’t a reliable witness. But why all of a sudden was Duwayne not considered a reliable suspect? Well the Sergeant who oversaw the identity parade in which Duwayne identified Luke Knight, DS Christopher Crawley, said that Duwayne had told him he was picking suspects out based upon descriptions friends had given him of the Acourt Brothers. Duwayne obviously denies all of this, he does however say that he had described Stephen’s attackers to friends and they had said that it sounded like Jamie Acourt from his description.

If Duwayne had any credibility left, that was destroyed by police in October that year when he was arrested for overturning a car at the demonstration outside BNP headquarters in May just weeks after Stephen’s death.

That summer Stephen’s family held a memorial at their local church, which was attended by hundreds of people. The police asked the family if they could attend and Doreen said no, they didn’t want the police there. Stephen’s body was eventually flown to Jamaica and he was buried there because as his mother said “Britain doesn’t deserve him.”

The case went quite quiet after the charges were dropped. In December 1993 the Southwark coroner Sir Montague Levine halted an inquest into Stephen’s death after the family’s barrister, Michael Mansfield QC, said there is “dramatic” new evidence, believed to include information identifying three new suspects. But in April 1994 the CPS once again said there wasn’t sufficient evidence.

After the CPS once again refused to prosecute due to lack of evidence, Neville and Doreen decided to initiate a private prosecution against the five youths. It was a long process and by the time the case went to trial in April 1996 charges had already been dropped against Jamie Acourt and David Norris due to lack of evidence. On 23 April 1996, the three remaining suspects Neil Acourt, Luke Knight and Gary Dobson were acquitted of murder by a jury after the trial judge, Mr Justice Curtis, ruled that the identification evidence given by Duwayne Brooks was unreliable.

Duwayne says in the documentary Stephen:The Murder That Changed A Nation he knew that if he didn’t give evidence he would be blamed for the trial collapsing, but that he also knew his identification evidence once again wasn’t going to be good enough.

An inquest into Stephen’s death was held in February 1997, with the jury returning a verdict after 30 minutes’ deliberation of unlawful killing “in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths”; this finding went beyond the bounds of their instructions, they weren’t supposed to say in court that they believed it was because of the five white youths, they were just supposed to say whether or not it was murder.

The five suspects were all summoned to give evidence, all refused to answer any questions, claiming privilege against self-incrimination, which is the British version of taking the fifth.

Following the verdict and in a rare break from spewing divisive, racist vile, British newspaper the Daily Mail ran a front page with the headline “Murderers. The Mail accuses these men of killing Stephen Lawrence. If we are wrong, let them sue us.” Underneath were photos of the five suspects.

To this day none of them have brought any legal action against the Daily Mail.

The inquest was essentially the end of the line, the CPS refused to prosecute, the private prosecution had seen the suspects acquitted and because of double jeopardy they couldn’t be prosecuted again, so the only thing left to do was record a verdict of unlawful killing, which is what they did.

Five months after the inquest, in the summer of 1997, Home Secretary Jack Straw ordered an inquiry into the investigation, the findings of which became known as the Macpherson Report. The public inquiry was headed up by Sir William Macpherson, hence the name, and found that the Metropolitan Police Service was institutionally racist. The report also recommended that the double jeopardy rule should be repealed in murder and other serious cases (including manslaughter, kidnapping, rape, armed robbery, and some drug crimes) to allow a retrial upon new and compelling evidence: this was effected upon enactment of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The report also found that the Metropolitan Police had ignored the findings of the Scarman report in 1981 which as we mentioned before concluded that urgent action was needed to prevent “racial discrimination” and a “racial disadvantage” in Britain, becoming an “endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society”.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003, which didn’t actually go into law until 2005, meant that double jeopardy didn’t apply in murder cases where there was new evidence. So that meant that if there was new evidence that implicated Gary Dobson, Neil Acourt, Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight and David Norris in Stephen’s murder, they could be prosecuted again.

In June 2006, a cold case review commenced, involving a full re-examination of the forensic evidence, although this was kept fairly quiet for over a year. The cold case was headed up by Detective Clive Driscoll.

He found that reports had been prepared which said that Doreen had refused the police access to Stephen’s school records, but then he read police statements and she had given the records over without question. So at that point Clive Driscoll realised he couldn’t trust what he had been told by his own colleagues in the Met, so he decided to reinvestigate every inch of the case.

Stephen’s attack was always described as very brief, they stabbed him then ran. But Clive quickly found that the attack lasted 50 seconds, not a brief attack at all. When he realised this he realised that a 50 second attack meant there would have been a lot more forensic evidence that was originally thought. Obviously in the 13 years since Stephen’s murder forensic science developed massively.

The two most important pieces of new evidence were a microscopic blood stain on one of the suspects’ clothing and fibres and hairs from Stephen and his clothing that were found on multiple items of clothing belonging to two of the suspects.

Oh, and these were found within three weeks of Clive taking over the case.

The original evidence bags were also examined because over the years when the bags had been moved or knocked about, some of the dried blood had flaked away from the clothing and they could piece it back to where it had initially dried on the clothing.

In September 2010 Gary Dobson and David Norris were arrested and charged with Stephen’s murder, and in October 2010 the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, who is now leader of the Labour Party, applied to the Court of Appeal for Dobson’s original acquittal in the private prosecution to be quashed. And at a hearing in April 2011 it was quashed which allowed for him to be tried for Stephen Lawrence’s murder a second time. The charges against Norris had been dropped before the private prosecution went to court so there was no need for an acquittal.

The case went to trial on November 14 2010 at the Old Bailey in London, and centred on the new forensic evidence. The defence argued that it had been contaminated, it hadn’t been stored properly. But the evidence was admissible in court, and that wasn’t the only thing.

When the suspects had been under surveillance, cameras and microphones had been placed in their homes and recorded hours and hours of them talking about how much they wanted to kill black people.

Other footage showed them playing with knives and acting out stabbing a black man, in the exact same manner that Stephen Lawrence was stabbed.

Duwayne Brooks once again gave evidence at trial, but this time was given the credibility he deserved.

On January 3 2012, nearly 19 years after the fact, Gary Dobson and David Norris were found guilty of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

The pair were sentenced at her majesty’s pleasure, which basically means a sentence of indeterminate length, with a minimum of 15 years and two months for Dobson, and 14 years and three months for Norris.

Duwayne Brooks has gone on to become an MP first as a member of the Liberal Democrat party, then as an independent and currently as a Tory. In 2006 he was awarded £100,000 compensation from the Metropolitan Police for the way he was treated. It was also revealed that he had been the subject of the Special Demonstration Squad, which was a controversial undercover branch of the Met set up to infiltrate protest groups. Officers were sent undercover to try and find and expose incriminating material on Duwayne, the Lawrence family and their supporters. Anything to smear Stephen Lawrence and push the narrative that Stephen was just a black gangbanger who got killed in a drug deal gone wrong.

The Pitchford Inquiry was commissioned by Theresa May in 2015 into Undercover Policing in the UK, focusing on the infiltration of more than 1000 protest groups by undercover officers from 1968 onwards, it is not due to report back until 2023.

Doreen and Neville Lawrence divorced in the early 2000s, and Neville returned to Jamaica but Doreen remained in London. She has been made a Baroness, and sits on the labour benches in the House of Lords specialising in race and diversity.

She also carried the Olympic flag during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Games. In October 2012 she received the Pride of Britain Award.
An annual architectural award, the Stephen Lawrence Prize, was established by the Marco Goldschmied Foundation in association with the Royal Institute of British Architects in Lawrence’s memory.

The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust was set up in 2002 and according to their website they are an educational organisation who “work with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds aged 13 to 30 to inspire and enable them to succeed in the career of their choice. We also influence others to create a fairer society in which everyone, regardless of their background, can flourish.” Stephen’s younger brother Stuart was a trustee of the charity for many years.

On April 23 2018 then Prime Minister Theresa May declared that from 2019 onwards April 22 would be Stephen Lawrence Day. The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust says that: Stephen Lawrence Day is about the part we all play in creating a society in which everyone can flourish. It is an opportunity for children and young people to have their voices heard, make the changes they’d like to see and create a society that treats everyone with fairness and respect.