Charles III has granted Ruth Ellis a conditional pardon, commuting the death sentence that made her the last woman executed in Britain to life imprisonment. Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy announced the decision on July 8, 2026, saying he hoped it would bring her family some peace.
Ellis was hanged in 1955 for killing David Blakely, the man who had punched her until she miscarried.
At trial she told the court exactly what it needed to hear: “It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.” The jury took 20 minutes. Seventy-one years later, a king has undone the sentence that killed her.
Ellis shot Blakely outside a Hampstead pub on Easter Sunday in 1955. He was a hard-drinking racing driver who had punched her in the stomach months earlier, causing her to miscarry. The trial never weighed the abuse, and it never heard that a second man, Desmond Cussen, had given her the gun and taught her to fire it the weekend before.
She was hanged at Holloway Prison on July 13, 1955. A petition signed by 50,000 people asked for clemency and was rejected; the Home Secretary said the injury to a bystander was decisive.
Ten years after her death, Britain halted executions for murder. Her case had helped get them there.
