Britain Admits 'Ruth Should Not Have Been Executed'

The last woman to be executed in Britain, who gunned down her abusive lover outside a London pub more than 70 years ago, will be conditionally pardoned, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said Wednesday. 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.

"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 recognize a profound injustice in this exceptional case," Lammy said, per the AP. 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.

Lawyers representing her grandchildren applied for the pardon last year by presenting evidence that Ellis likely suffered from what became known as "battered woman syndrome." 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. Jurors in her case, however, were told not to consider that she had been "badly treated by her lover." The trial lasted just over a day, and the jury reached its verdict in less than a half-hour.

"This pardon ... says, formally and finally, that Ruth should not have been executed; that the justice system failed her. That acknowledgment matters profoundly to our family," Laura Enston, a granddaughter, said in a statement. Enston said her mother and uncle, Ellis' two children, never recovered after the execution. "My uncle took his own life; my mother's trauma left her unable to be the parent we needed," Enston said. "The shadow of Ruth's execution has fallen across two generations. We have carried shame that was never ours to bear." The UK suspended the death penalty in 1965 and abolished it in 1970.