The execution of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged...

The execution of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, remains the single most glaring miscarriage of British justice in modern times.
There is no doubt that she killed her faithless lover, David Blakely, outside a Hampstead pub in 1955. Equally, there can be little doubt that the circumstances did not warrant a murder conviction, let alone the death penalty.
Her execution appears outrageously unfair by modern lights, but more importantly it was plainly unjust by the legal standards of half a century ago. She would never be convicted of murder now and should not have been convicted of murder then.
The mitigating circumstances surrounding Blakely's killing are more then enough to warrant reducing the murder conviction to manslaughter on the ground of diminished mental responsibility.
The Ellis case, which was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), has become so entwined with emotional politics over the years, and so sensationalised in film and book, that it is worth recalling that a 28-year-old woman was executed, in the end, because she was a boozer, a victim, and a tragic human failure.
Her lawyers were probably negligent; the jury were kept in ignorance of key facts; they convicted on her morals as well as her crime. She stands as an enduring symbol of why the death penalty was rightly abolished.