It's the dignity of people who are grieving over loved ones who've been murdered which never ceases to surprise me.
My jobs over the last 11 years, as Home and Foreign Secretary, and now Justice Secretary, have brought me into far more contact with such victims' families than I had anticipated.
In one sense all murders are the same - they are by definition bound to involve the unlawful killing of someone. But the circumstances of each murder vary hugely. At one end of the scale there's the case a few years back of a man aged 100 who was charged with murder (though eventually only convicted of manslaughter) who smothered his wife of 60 years, (and whom he never stopped loving) because she was in the advanced unbearable stages of an incurable condition.
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At the other end there are the appalling serial killers like Peter Sutcliffe, Fred West and, more recently, Steve Wright, the so-called "Suffolk strangler".
Near that end of the scale come the killers of a young black man, in south London, in April 1993. Stephen Lawrence was then aged 18.
Bright, his ambition was to be an architect.
He was minding his own business at a bus stop (and had never been in any kind of trouble with the police) when a group of white racist thugs set on him - because he was black - and killed him.
The grief of the family was then compounded by the ineptitude and worse of the police investigation.
The killers have yet to be brought to justice.
One of the most important decisions I made when I was Home Secretary was to order an inquiry into Stephen's murder.
The subsequent report by Sir William Macpherson criticised the police inquiry and concluded that the Metropolitan Police was, at the time, "institutionally racist".
Thanks first and foremost to the determination of his family, we politicians were not allowed to forget his death and its circumstances.
And because the 70 recommendations of the Lawrence inquiry were implemented, our society changed.
We have the most comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation in Europe, there are few racist crimes, more confidence among ethnic communities that they are being treated fairly by the police and the justice system and more black and Asian officers being recruited into the police and other public bodies.
Most importantly though, the Lawrence inquiry has helped to change the very fabric of our society.
There has been a sea-change in attitudes: racist language is no longer laughed off and doesn't go unchallenged.
We have not reached a state of grace - but things have changed.
It should not, of course, have taken the outrageous murder of a thoroughly decent young man, killed for the sole reason that his skin was black and not white, to have been the catalyst for change which should have happened years before.
It is an eternal tragedy that so much that is good, so much that is innocent is sacrificed before we wake up to what is so wrong.
That is why we must continue to strive, in Stephen's memory, to make further improvements. We must not let up in our drive to excise discrimination from our society.
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