The fatal illusions of injustice -Aug 21, 2006

Earlier this month (August 2006) two teenagers were found guilty of killing 10-year-old Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor after a six-year investigation marred by many legal and forensic blunders.

The 18 and 19-year-old brothers, from Peckham, South London, were convicted of the manslaughter of young Damilola, who died on the stairwell of a run-down housing estate in November 2000, after being stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle. He was killed just months after arriving in the country.

It took another re-examination of the case to reveal the vital clues to get a conviction. No doubt the parents of unsolved high profile murder cases like Stephen Lawrence in London, Milly Dowler in Surrey, Thomas Devlin in Belfast, and many others, are hoping for similar breakthroughs.

Stephen Lawrence was minding his own business at a bus stop in 1993 when he was set upon by a bunch of vicious thugs. That was thirteen years ago, and still nobody has been brought to justice for his murder.

In July 2006 the BBC broadcast a TV programme alleging that the police investigation was mired in corruption, with one police office taking bribes from a suspect's father. The police deny this. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is to launch an inquiry.

Meanwhile, the very idea that these people remain at large remains an affront to justice, an affront to Stephen's family, and indeed, an affront to us all.

And it is this same sense of injustice that often finds its voice in the pages of the Bible. "I saw the prosperity of the wicked", said the Psalmist. "They scoff and speak with malice". "Such are the wicked" he continues, "always at ease, they increase in riches".

So what justice is there in the world when - as so often seems the case - the wicked prosper and the good get nowhere? Is virtue simply a mug's game, a nice but finally deluded idea?

The philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that the purpose of a Divine final judgment was to punish the wicked and reward the righteous, thus to make life fair.

Most people today, however, are no longer so clear-sighted about the existence of heaven and hell. And so, unlike our forbears, we don't have a sense of some ultimate satisfaction where those who have committed terrible greats will get their comeuppance.

It is this reality that makes the ancient Psalmist's frustration at the continuing prosperity of the wicked all the more contemporary.

But do the wicked really prosper? The great Christian writer, activist and thinker Simone Weil argued that, on the contrary, a life of evil is never genuinely prosperous, that such a life is "gloomy, monotonous, barren and boring".

In the imagination, we often think of those who've got away with it as sipping their sangrias in luxury, living it up and smirking at the rest of us from beyond the reach of the law. It is an image that has encouraged many into a life of crime and violence. It is, apparently, a way to have it all, and have it all quickly.

But I think this is a trap. For a life dominated by wickedness turns out to be empty and claustrophobic. It transforms the human soul into a wizened-up wasteland precisely because, in the end, the only talent that evil has is for destruction. To create, to grow, to love, to find joy and excitement in others: all this requires an ability that evil cannot muster.

That is why it would be best – probably contrary to what they think – for the people who murdered Stephen Lawrence, or anyone, to stop cowering in the dark and find the courage to hand themselves over to the police.

Only then can new life begin again for all, including for them.