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Stephen Lawrence murder trial begins at Old Bailey

just read on a football related forum that Dobson's had a good kicking inside recently, broken ribs sustained. could be a long old stretch for these two.....
 
BBC News predicts that because the judge will have to sentence as if they are minors, they could be looking at 15 years or possibly even less.

Doesn't seem like a lot, especially considering all the years they've got off. =/
 
BBC News predicts that because the judge will have to sentence as if they are minors, they could be looking at 15 years or possibly even less.

Doesn't seem like a lot, especially considering all the years they've got off. =/
These two ain't had much life in the meantime. They ain't the Acourts.
 
boo fucking hoo, not had much of a life. fuck them tbh.
I agree wholeheartedly with you with the boohoo. I think though if anything they have a Dante's Inferno style retribution for what they done. Years of Unemployment and vilification. Now years of prison. It's hardly going to improve when they get out either (if they make it).
 
Was gonna say earlier the Mail was inevitably going to go to town on having run *that* headline.

Have to say despite my dislike for the DM, I will always respect them for this. It was unprecedented and I could be wrong but seemed to me to give a boost to the campaign having media pressure coming from the right as well as the left.
 
Sometimes racism is insidious, and therefore hard to challenge.

A young black friend of mine who works in the gaming industry tells that, as the only black person in the office, most of the white people don't seem to know how to engage with him. When walking along a corridor he sees them deciding whether to greet him, to meet his eye, asking themselves "Well how would I greet a white person?" and trying to replicate it. He tells of how they make cheerful attempts to include him in conversation, after ceasing the conversation that was ongoing when he arrived.

Because of an HR problem, I pressed him on certain points. He was reluctant to suspect his colleagues of racism, but in the end the HR issue turned out to be a racist one.

How does one tackle this kind of invisible silent racism?

I have white South London acquaintances (Croydon & Crystal Palace) who have become more overtly racist in the last several months (since the riots, in fact...). They have hidden this from me over the years, presumably because they knew the reaction they'd get if they were more open.

I've had conversations with these people about their attitudes, and no longer see them. I recognise that nothing I have said will materially change their attitudes.

How can one challenge racism if it is hidden?

Mrs Magpie: I rarely encounter racism here in Brixton, but I know it happens. A poster on here recently experienced a racist comment in her child's school, in Lambeth. A mixed race friend of mine was recently turned down for a building job after being asked on the phone "Where were you born? (Zambia) We only employ British people". When he told me about it (again, only when I pressed him) I asked how often he encounters racism and he said "Weekly, at least." He lives in Tottenham.

When I asked these friends why they were so reluctant to speak about their experiences they told me that they can't change it, and don't want to waste time thinking about it, it's just part of their experience.

It prompted me to ask around, and the answers I have received suggest to me that racism is common, normal, and tolerated.

The racism displayed by the Lawrence killers is overt and dangerous, but the hidden racism is no less dangerous, and just as invidious.

How on earth would he know what someone else is thinking?
 
e2a to 39th step
have u got a link to go with that?
i agree with Spy, i felt the tension and danger being there and travelling through and i am white
i also worked with people from the area and even when i moved away had to go back for work sometimes and it didn't seem to have changed.
stoat boy is an apologist and what is your answer to what you have quoted above? racism=racism=racism
and guilt=guilt
also bang on VP and Streathamite

http://www.redaction.org/anti-fascism/is_anti-racism.html
 
Have to say despite my dislike for the DM, I will always respect them for this. It was unprecedented and I could be wrong but seemed to me to give a boost to the campaign having media pressure coming from the right as well as the left.
Hearing Dacre on the radio coming close to claiming credit for the emancipation proclamation was a bit sickening though.
 
Have to say despite my dislike for the DM, I will always respect them for this. It was unprecedented and I could be wrong but seemed to me to give a boost to the campaign having media pressure coming from the right as well as the left.

At the time it was published, emotively at least I thought "good on the mail" (first and last time)

But in hindsight what I felt doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

These things need to run through as good a judicial process as we can get. To abandon that is mob justice. It's only steps away from the News of The World and peadiatricians being beaten up.

With such a bold headline, there's almost no doubt - in my mind - it was prejudicial to everything that followed. They didn't sue, ergo: Guilty as charged by the Mail. That's not an unreasonable, if simplistic, conclusion many will have come to (I certainly did).

We have to do better than that.

Finally, for at least two of the perpetrators, we have. I hope the remaining three are convicted - without the likes of the Mail getting into dangerous territory, no matter the visceral appeal.
 
Dunno really. From what I followed of the latest case (obviously I didn't see all the evidence) I was not convinced "beyond reasonable doubt" of their guilt, since the plods had generally made a mess of the forensic evidence, and while the taped conversations proved conclusively that they are / were racist twunts, proof of being a racist twunt doesn't strike me as conclusive evidence of having committed one particular racist attack.

This whole case has led to a lot of odd positions.

The Daily Fail is hardly a beacon of anti racist campaigning - the cynical part of me wonders whether they would take up a case so eagerly if the victim was a black unemployed youth and the alleged attackers a bit more middle class.

The reaction of a lot of "law and order" types has been to get indignant about the abolition of the 'double jeopardy' rule. I suspect they (and the "lefties" referred to somewhere on this thread) might have reacted differently if the first such case had been (say) a black youth accused of attacking a policeman.

As for Eltham - one London district can't be pigeon-holed, let alone any London borough, or the whole bit on one side of the River. For a start, those of us from that far out in SE London (I grew up in the Grove Park kinda region) aren't "cockneys" thanks all the same.

But Eltham does seem to some extent to be different from many areas around it. To some extent, Woolwich / Eltham has a character more like a "one industry town" outside London - much of the housing estates round Well Hall went up during the 1914-18 war and subsequently, and much of the employment was based on the munitions / engineering trades around Woolwich. (compare & contrast with Dagenham and Fords)
 
Can't be a lesser charge, they have both been convicted of murder. They can only be sentenced to life. What their briefs have been quibbling about since the verdict is mitigation to be reflected in the minimum recommendation they each receive as to how long they must serve before they can be considered for parole. An agreement to grass at this, or a later stage would be reflected in the min. rec.

What I do not know, will the min. rec. be set at today's rates, or as if they'd been sentenced at the time of the attack? Back in the mid 90's the min. recs. were a fair bit less that they are today.
Either way theyll probably be on 43's so grassing the others up shouldnt make any difference...
 
I don't know Eltham at all. I could be entirely wrong. Maybe it is something in the water round there. I do know we had riots that were attributed to race here, and that it became very fashionable to dismiss the whole estate, or even the whole town, as some white working class shithole where anybody looking a bit different wasn't welcome. Which, inevitably, caused attitudes to harden amongst some.

I'd suggest the vilification QP/Wrexham received in the wake of the riots was nothing compared to Eltham in the wake of Lawrence's murder. I'd suggest negative media reports condemning a whole community and everybody who lives there as backwards bigots often has the effect of creating a siege mentality in which frequently the negative traits attributed to them are embraced, at least by some.

But I don't know. It just seems a bit daft to dismiss the whole place as seemingly populated only by irredeemable racists.
Ordsall ???
 
I've always thought the double jeopardy rule was a weird anomaly. Why shouldn't someone be tried again if new and sufficient has come to light?

As for the convictions. They are safe enough for me. Whilst I accept there is an argument for cross contamination as was put forward by their defence this conviction is as a result of the sum of all parts. The lies. The video evidence. Also (and I know this wasn't considered by the jury) the pair have a history of violent behaviour some of which was racist according to the article I read in the telegraph.
 
At the time it was published, emotively at least I thought "good on the mail" (first and last time)

But in hindsight what I felt doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

These things need to run through as good a judicial process as we can get. To abandon that is mob justice. It's only steps away from the News of The World and peadiatricians being beaten up.

With such a bold headline, there's almost no doubt - in my mind - it was prejudicial to everything that followed. They didn't sue, ergo: Guilty as charged by the Mail. That's not an unreasonable, if simplistic, conclusion many will have come to (I certainly did).

We have to do better than that.

Finally, for at least two of the perpetrators, we have. I hope the remaining three are convicted - without the likes of the Mail getting into dangerous territory, no matter the visceral appeal.
what I thought was a) we all knew they werefucking guilty; b) everyone also knows suing for libel is a rich man's game. Frankly the dm could have claimed I killed sl and I wouldn't have been able to sue. So, the mail was throwing its weight about and for once its desire to sell papers and people's anger about the murder coincided
 
meaning most of the pubs round there,
weird oasis of hate it was when i lived and worked around there
and they seem proud of their saaarf lundon/kent border asshole attitude

I met a cheeky chappy from Eltham who was 'racist and proud' on holiday in Mexico a few years back. I just commented that in view of this, his choice of destination was perplexing.
 
^ I think for most of them the issue is immigration into this country. They're not generally concerned with tourism.

I'm surprised he didn't mention that to you.
 
Me neither. If they're from people you know, change your social circle. I'm not saying I never hear anything racist, but it's rare compared to when I was a child, or indeed my younger years generally. I think the last person I heard being a racist twat was David Starkey, and at the other end of of the braincell spectrum, that tram woman, so basically, on youtube, and from people of widely different levels of education. It still exists, but attracts opprobrium.

Yes, but you live in Brixton in cosmopolitan London. Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, casual racism is alive and well, ime.

In my home town 'paki' is used in everyday language by many. It perpetuates through confirmation bias. If I object, it is usually me who is viewed as having a problem.
 
^ I think for most of them the issue is immigration into this country. They're not generally concerned with tourism.

I'm surprised he didn't mention that to you.

Hey said 'racist and proud'. He didn't furnish me with the specifics and nor did I encourage further dialogue on the matter.
 
Yes, but you live in Brixton in cosmopolitan London. Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, casual racism is alive and well, ime.
I used to hear casual racism in Brixton all the time. Of course there are racists here, but in the thirty-odd years I've lived here things have changed for the better and it will elsewhere too. It's about a critical mass of people who make it clear it's out of order.
 
what I thought was a) we all knew they werefucking guilty; b) everyone also knows suing for libel is a rich man's game. Frankly the dm could have claimed I killed sl and I wouldn't have been able to sue. So, the mail was throwing its weight about and for once its desire to sell papers and people's anger about the murder coincided

Neville Lawrence was Paul Dacre's decorator iirc. That's why the DM took up the case.
 
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