Stephen Lawrence's murder: A formative outrage
David Norris has reportedly admitted he was at the scene and 'punched' the victim
One of Stephen Lawrence’s killers has accepted he was at the scene of the brutal murder in Eltham, south east London, in 1993, according to a statement by the Parole Board reported this morning.
David Norris, 48, was sentenced at the Old Bailey in January 2012 to a minimum of 14 years and three months for murder. Gary Dobson, another suspect, was also jailed for life in 2012.
But the Metropolitan Police – which was found by an independent review (the Macpherson report) to have been riddled with institutional racism and has been accused of corruption as well as incompetence – has always maintained that a gang of six men took part in the unprovoked attack. Three other prime suspects, Luke Knight, and the brothers Neil and Jamie Acourt, have remained free and have always denied the crime. A sixth suspect identified by the BBC, Matthew White, died in 2021.
Norris is set to face his first parole hearing on a date yet to be fixed. Yesterday, the Parole Board granted an application for the hearing to be held in public. The vice-chair of the board, Peter Rook KC, said in the ruling: ‘After the trial, Mr Norris continued to deny the offence. Recent reports now suggest he has accepted he was present at the scene and punched the victim but claims that he did not wield the knife. He does not accept he holds racist views.’
‘I am not satisfied with him getting parole but what I am saying is if he can show remorse and show he’s changed then I will accept that.’ Neville Lawrence
Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s father, has told the Daily Mail (which deserves praise for its coverage of the case) that he would accept Norris getting parole if the suspect showed remorse. ‘He would have to say he was sorry for killing Stephen and that he had changed his ways and apologise to our family [for me to accept his release],’ he said. ‘I am not satisfied with him getting parole but what I am saying is if he can show remorse and show he’s changed then I will accept that.’
For many growing up in London at the time (I was 14), Stephen Lawrence’s senseless murder was a formative experience, and influenced the way we thought about the world, and specifically about racism in society and in the police, as well as in wider institutions, including politics.
When I went into journalism, I made sure I covered institutional racism, and in 2009 I listed in a long New Statesman article incidents of police racism including the many black murders in police custody for which not one officer had been held to account. Since 1990, there have been around 2,000 deaths of black people in police custody or after contact with police in England and Wales, accounting for some 16 per cent of such deaths. The New Statesman, which made the piece the magazine’s cover story at the time, now appears to have taken it offline, though it and its headline ‘Public enemy number one’ are referred to elsewhere.
Wikipedia
That same year – the only time in more than twenty years of journalism that an article I'd written has ever been successfully challenged legally – Daniel Hannan sued the New Statesman over a response I bashed out as part of a rolling blog to a Telegraph article in which Hannan wrote: 'Barack Obama has an exotic background and it would be odd if some people weren't unsettled by it.' He went on: '[Obama seems to] have family on every continent...'[I]t could hardly fail to leave a chunk of people feeling that Obama wasn't exactly a regular guy.'
In my article, which was 'Fisked' by Iain Dale (who would later publish a book by Mehdi Hasan and me), and also taken down from the internet by the New Statesman, I had backed claims, reported in the Mirror and elsewhere, that Hannan's blog was racist, and accused the party of institutional racism. You can imagine how I felt when, seven years later, Hannan's friend and Brexit ally Boris Johnson was very widely accused of racism and 'dog whistle' politics, including in a report in the Daily Mail, when, in a highly controversial column for The Sun, he referred to Obama and the 'part-Kenyan president's ancestral dislike of the British empire'.
Time change, I guess.
It was another form of Tory racism – antisemitism, believe it or not – that was my main focus as a journalist back in late 2009, when Hannan successfully challenged my article. I appeared on the BBC's Daily Politics to discuss the matter, and after that was targeted dishonestly by several rightwing bloggers (one of whom is political editor of the Sun today) who only ceased when I resigned from the New Statesman, but that’s for another day.
Today, our prayer is for Stephen Lawrence and his family, that justice may finally be done in the institutions, and that the hearts of the killers are changed so that they can show the remorse so rightly requested by Neville Lawrence.