BRITAIN: Two former suspects in one of Britain's most notorious unsolved race murders were jailed yesterday for an unrelated offence of racially abusing a black policeman close to the scene of the original 1993 crime.
The 1993 murder of black student Stephen Lawrence in an unprovoked attack by a gang of white youths, and the subsequent police bungling of the investigation, provoked a public outcry and accusations of institutional racism in the police force.
Two of the five men originally charged in connection with the Lawrence case - David Norris and Neil Acourt - were given 18-month prison terms yesterday for abusing off-duty Det Con Gareth Reid as he walked home in Eltham, south London, in May last year.
"This is a good day for the people of Eltham. This is a good day for the victims of race crime," Det Insp Mark Castell told reporters after the sentence was announced.
London mayor Mr Ken Livingstone said the pair were "a menace to society" and that their jailing sent out a message that the city would not tolerate racism.
During the trial, the court was told that the pair had driven a car close to the detective, hurled a drinks carton at him and that Norris (25), the passenger in the car driven by Acourt (27), had shouted "nigger".
Norris, from Kent, testified that he threw the drinks carton because the detective had given him a "certain look".
He said he had suffered "nine years of persecution" since the Lawrence murder and the stress of bringing up four children led him to lose his temper in a "moment of madness".
Norris had the Lawrence murder charges against him dropped.
Acourt, from Greenwich, southeast London, and three others eventually went to trial for murder in 1996 but were cleared.
Subsequently, a jury at a 1997 inquest into Lawrence's death found the teenager had been killed in an unprovoked attack by a gang of white youths.
Lawrence's death, and the aftermath of political soul-searching over racism in Britain, eventually led to a major overhaul of London's policing procedures.
An independent inquiry in 1999 found that officers had failed to investigate the case properly because of "a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers".
Earlier this week, London's top policeman, Sir John Stevens, was quoted as saying that proposed changes to Britain's "double jeopardy" law, which states no one can be tried twice for the same crime, could have an impact on the unsolved case.
"We will be reviewing cases," he told Britain's Independent newspaper. "There ... would obviously be Lawrence (under review), and we would also be looking at other cases.