Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, will receive a conditional pardon in recognition of a “profound injustice”, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy announced in parliament on Wednesday (UK time).<\/p>\n
It comes after a decades-long campaign by her family.<\/p>\n
Ellis, a 28-year-old nightclub hostess, was hanged in July 1955 for shooting dead her racing driver lover David Blakely as he came out of the Magdala pub in London.<\/p>\n
The case gripped Britain and was turned into the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger starring Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett.<\/p>\n
A mother of two children aged just three and 10, Ellis’s execution provoked a public outcry and helped swing public opinion against the death penalty.<\/p>\n
Ellis’s family had argued that she was an abused woman and that a modern-day case would likely have resulted in a charge of manslaughter not murder.<\/p>\n
“I have the honour to say that his majesty the king has accepted our advice to grant Ruth Ellis a conditional pardon,” Lammy told lawmakers as two of Ellis’s six grandchildren watched from the public gallery.<\/p>\n
“While the pardon does not claim she was innocent of killing David Blakely, it replaces the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment to recognise a profound injustice in this exceptional case,” he added.<\/p>\n
An application last year to Lammy, also justice minister, by four of her grandchildren highlighted the “repeated and long-standing sexual, emotional and physical abuse Ellis suffered” at the hands of Blakely.<\/p>\n
Granddaughter Laura Enston said justice had “finally been done” for Ruth Ellis and the family she left behind.<\/p>\n
“Ruth was a victim of sustained and brutal abuse. Her children – our mother and uncle – never recovered. The shadow of Ruth’s execution has fallen across two generations,” she said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“This pardon does not undo what happened 71 years ago. It does not restore the lives that were broken – the children left behind, the years lost.<\/p>\n
“But it says, formally and finally, that Ruth should not have been executed; that the justice system failed her,” she added.<\/p>\n
‘Slow-burn provocation’<\/p>\n
Enston told AFP last year that abuse was poorly understood at the time.<\/p>\n
She said her grandmother would now have been considered a victim of battered woman syndrome and treated very differently by the justice system.<\/p>\n
The glamorous single mother from a modest background had shown no emotion during her trial at which the jury took just 14 minutes to find her guilty.<\/p>\n
“She inadvertently played up to that sort of cold-blooded killer persona that she’d been portrayed to be, but knowing what we know now about trauma and slow-burn provocation, Ruth was traumatised… and typical of domestic abuse victims,” Enston said.<\/p>\n
The abuse included an incident 10 days before the killing in April 1955 when Ellis suffered a miscarriage after Blakely, the baby’s father, punched her in the stomach.<\/p>\n
James Libson of law firm Mischon de Reya, which represented the family, said Ellis “suffered considerably” at the hands of her “abusive, violent partner”.<\/p>\n
Her hanging proved instrumental in ending the death penalty in Britain.<\/p>\n
Following a number of other controversial executions and a series of miscarriages of justice it was permanently abolished for murder in 1969.<\/p>\n
Two years after Ellis’s execution the law was also changed to allow a defence of diminished responsibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, will receive a conditional pardon in recognition of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-516506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}