LONDON (AP) — The last woman to be executed in Britain, for gunning down her abusive lover outside a London pub more than 70 years ago, has been posthumously granted a conditional pardon, 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.
So they still think she deserved to die in prison, but the slow way? :/
She was convicted of murder, life in prison is the mandatory punishment for that in the UK currently, so, yes.
Back in 1955, actually up to 1969, the mandatory punishment for murder was execution.
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.
“Justice has finally been done,” Laura Enston, a granddaughter, said in a statement. “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. 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.”
While from the outside this feels like little more than a token gesture, it at least seems to have brought closure to her surviving grandchildren - to have this failure by the justice system acknowledged and apologised for in a official and public capacity.
This is why no fault divorce is a good thing (I have no idea about UK law, I’m assuming.)
That means fuck all to her now.
But it means something to her grandchildren, as per the article.
Yup. Made me think of the Alanis Morrissette song.
It’s a death row pardon,
7 decades too late…
Isn’t it ironic?
Worse: It’s probably pretty upsetting and bringing up stuff she’d worked hard to get over.
it replaces the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment
I wonder if there’s an article out there which uses this as a headline, would be good for the “not the onion” communities
Interesting how she committed the offence in April and was hung in July of the same year. Different world back then, I suppose.
Oh cool! Performative bullshit!
It would’ve been funnier if the condition was that she stay dead.
This is one of those where you see the headline and assumed it happened during WWII, not the mid 50s.
Star Wars was in theaters at the same time as the last execution by guillotine.
A whopping twelve years difference there.
The were savages back in 2014!
You’re not wrong
