“WHEN he was in pain I wasn’t there, that’s what bothers me.”

In those few simple words Doreen Lawrence lays bare the greatest anguish a mother can endure – knowing that when it mattered most to her precious child, Stephen, she wasn’t there.

Never mind that if she had been on that Eltham pavement on that fateful night, David Norris and Gary Dobson and co would probably have stabbed her, too.

Doreen can’t get the image of her son, in pain and fear, out of her mind. Two of Stephen’s killers got less than 20 years but she is still serving a life sentence and always will. This case has held up a mirror to British society which has reflected back some vile images – of acute racism, racist police officers and monumental incompetence – but, I believe, it has also shown us something else.

It’s revealed that if the human rightists and the bleeding hearts who normally hold such sway over public and justice policy had been in charge, this case might never have made it into court.

Diane Abbot and her borderline racism against white folk apart, the liberalists have kept pretty quiet about this case because, to get the conviction, almost everything they spend their lives railing against had to happen.

The absurd double-jeopardy law, paraded by the left-leaning, which meant that people acquitted of a crime could never be tried again for it in the future, had to be scrapped in order to see Dobson and Norris in the dock.

The liberalists’ beloved Human Right to a private family life – frequently used by lawyers to get privileges for crims and scumbags – had to be virtually ripped up as cops bugged the suspects’ homes. It took the courage of a tabloid newspaper – not a lily-livered broadsheet – to galvanise the investigation into action by naming and shaming the perps on their front page, despite the horrendous legal risk.

And, on the final day of the hearing, the true extent of how far the cancer of political correctness has seeped became apparent as the killers were sentenced to just the minimum 15 and 14 years each.

“In modern times an adult committing this crime would be facing a life sentence with a starting point for a minimum of 30 years,” said Mr Justice Treacy.

Even though they were adults and had spent their adulthood lying about their guilt and committing further crimes, he couldn’t take it into consideration because we insist that people like Dobson and Norris must be treated as kids.

It’s truly pathetic as is the fact that some of the killers’ gang, who appear to have barely done an honest day’s work in their lives, have been able to claim benefits – because we think that discriminating between the deserving and the undeserving is immoral.

Reading about the background of the murderers I did wonder, in another life, how very much we would be invited by the liberalists to view them as poor, lost boys, victims of criminal backgrounds, ignorant and ill-educated, yadda yadda yadda.

Thankfully lessons have already been learned from this terrible case but please can we learn one more?

And that is that while hand-wringing, excuse-making and pandering to the criminal fraternity may give us the kind of laws that please the European Court of Human Rights, they could so nearly have resulted in the justice we’ve seen this week being denied.