sp1814...You are right but you run the great danger of being logical, which is an anathema to many here on AB ! Of course Mrs Lawrence is correct in fighting for her son. Had she and her ex-husband not been insistent from day one,that Stephens murder be investigated properly, those two thugs would still be roaming our streets, ready to kill again, perhaps a white boy next time.
The reason that most of the killers are still free is that the Police made a complete Horlicks of the investigation, right from the start. Its hardly the first time that Police incompetence has allowed a miscarriage of justice to occur. I was reading about poor Timothy Evans on WiKi this morning ::::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christie_(murderer)#Innocence_of_Timothy_Evans
One aspect of the Lawrence case that still puzzles me is this.
The overriding reason that Dobson and Norris were finally convicted was because the Cold Case Unit were called in, and they found forensic evidence to link the two with Lawrence. Now if this evidence was found by the forensic scientists working on the Cold Case review, why was it not found during the original investigation ?
The outcome of the Enquiry quite clearly found that incompetence on the part of the Metropolitan Police was a major factor in the appalling way in which the case was investigated, but to ignore forensic evidence is quite a mistake.