{"id":1076527,"date":"2026-07-08T15:53:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T15:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1076527\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T15:53:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T15:53:17","slug":"last-woman-executed-in-britain-for-killing-abusive-lover-gets-a-conditional-pardon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1076527\/","title":{"rendered":"Last woman executed in Britain for killing abusive lover gets a conditional pardon"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON — The last woman to be executed in Britain<\/a>, for gunning down her abusive lover outside a London pub more than 70 years ago, will be conditionally pardoned, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Ruth Ellis, a 28-year-old single mother and nightclub hostess, was hanged on July 13, 1955, for the murder of race-car driver David Blakely. She shot him outside the Magdala pub in the Hampstead neighborhood on April 10, 1955.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the pardon does not claim she was innocent of killing David Blakely, it replaces the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment to recognize a profound injustice in this exceptional case,\u201d Lammy said.<\/p>\n

The killing and trial caused a sensation, and Ellis became a cause celebre. When she went to the gallows, 1,000 people held a silent vigil outside Holloway Prison in north London.<\/p>\n

Her case is believed to have changed British law. At trial, she was not allowed to argue that she acted because of the emotional impact of abuse. Two years after the hanging, Parliament passed a law allowing a diminished responsibility defense.<\/p>\n

The pardon was sought by her grandchildren, who have long fought to reduce her conviction because the repeated sexual, emotional and physical abuse Ellis endured was not considered during the trial or afterward, when she could have been granted a reprieve from the death penalty.<\/p>\n

\u201cJustice has finally been done,” Laura Enston, a granddaughter, said in a statement. \u201cThis pardon does not undo what happened 71 years ago. It does not restore the lives that were broken \u2014 the children left behind, the years lost. But it says, formally and finally, that Ruth should not have been executed; that the justice system failed her. That acknowledgment matters profoundly to our family.”<\/p>\n

Lawyers representing the family applied for the pardon last year by presenting evidence that Ellis likely suffered from what became known as \u201cbattered woman syndrome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellis and witnesses, including her friends and doctors, said Blakely threatened to kill her and she was covered in bruises from assaults in public and being pushed down stairs, the Mishcon de Reya law firm said. They said she was once struck so hard in the abdomen that it caused a miscarriage.<\/p>\n

Jurors in her case, however, were told not to consider that she had been \u201cbadly treated by her lover.\u201d The trial lasted just over a day, and the jury reached its verdict in less than a half-hour.<\/p>\n

If the law allowing a diminished responsibility defense had been in place at the time of the trial, lawyers who sought the pardon said Ellis at most would have been convicted of manslaughter and not been sentenced to death.<\/p>\n

The U.K. suspended the death penalty in 1965 and abolished it in 1970.<\/p>\n

Enston said her mother and uncle, Ellis’ two children, never recovered after the execution.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy uncle took his own life; my mother\u2019s trauma left her unable to be the parent we needed,” Enston said. \u201cThe shadow of Ruth\u2019s execution has fallen across two generations. We have carried shame that was never ours to bear.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crime and trial has been the subject of a 1985 feature film, \u201cDance with a Stranger,\u201d and a miniseries that aired on ITV last year called \u201cA Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON — The last woman to be executed in Britain, for gunning down her abusive lover outside a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1076528,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,7148,188,393,4179,4884,33036,7136,1144,130601,712,63907,16,15,1764,263],"class_list":["post-1076527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","category-uk","category-united-kingdom","tag-britain","tag-capital-punishment","tag-crime","tag-england","tag-general-news","tag-great-britain","tag-law-and-order","tag-legal-proceedings","tag-northern-ireland","tag-pardons-and-commutations","tag-scotland","tag-trials","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-wales","tag-world-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116885166719348873","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1076527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1076528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1076527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1076527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1076527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}