Britain's Court of Appeal upheld the conviction of...

Britain's Court of Appeal upheld the conviction of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain when she was sent to the gallows in 1955 for murdering her estranged lover. An appeal against the conviction had been brought by Ellis' 81-year-old sister. In a case that gripped the nation at the time, Ellis, a 28-year-old nightclub hostess, was hanged for shooting dead racing driver David Blakely as he came out of a London bar. Lawyers acting for Ellis' sister, Muriel Jakubait, had asked that the murder conviction be replaced by the lesser verdict of manslaughter due to provocation and/or diminished responsibility. In the court's eyes there had been no doubt that Ellis intended to kill her estranged lover - witnesses saw her fire five shots into him, the last at point blank range as he lay wounded. But Ellis's relatives argue she was suffering from "battered woman syndrome" due to abuse by Blakely, meaning she was not acting rationally. The abuse included an incident 10 days before the killing when Ellis had suffered a miscarriage after Blakely, the baby's father, punched her in the stomach.