1 case tagged “death penalty abolition”
Convicted: Ruth Ellis (née Neilson)
"It is obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him." With those eleven words, spoken calmly before a packed courtroom at the Old Bailey, Ruth Ellis handed the jury everything they needed. They deliberated for less than twenty-five minutes. Six weeks later, at nine o'clock on the morning of 13 July 1955, she walked to the gallows at Holloway Prison and became the last woman ever executed in the United Kingdom. She was twenty-eight years old. But the story of how a Welsh-born nightclub manageress came to fire four bullets into her racing-driver lover outside a Hampstead pub on Easter Sunday is not a simple story of jealousy and rage. It is a story of sustained beatings, a miscarriage caused by a punch to the stomach, a secret weapon supplier who was never charged with a crime, and a justice system that hanged a deeply traumatized woman without once telling the jury what she had endured. Seven decades later, her grandchildren are still fighting to clear her name. The question hanging over the case has never been whether Ruth Ellis pulled the trigger. It has always been whether Britain should have pulled the lever.
