On July 8, England’s Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, David Lammy, informed his colleagues in the House of Commons that King Charles had granted a conditional pardon to a woman who was executed on July 13, 1955. The beneficiary of the King’s posthumous mercy was Ruth Ellis, who, as a report in the Guardian notes, “was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom.”
Ellis had been convicted and sentenced to death when she was twenty-eight years old for murdering her lover, David Blakely, whom she met while working in a nightclub. During her trial, Ellis, who had been married before and who was the mother of two children, stated, “It was obvious that when I shot him I intended to kill him.”
Not surprisingly, Ellis’s trial attracted massive press interest. As Monash University’s Sue Tweg explained in an article about the trial, “The press provided sensationalized accounts of what night-club life was like, for the benefit of the vast majority of Britons in an exhausted, impoverished, and repressed postwar society who hadn’t much idea about night-clubs anyway.… Undeterred by facts, and anticipating plenty of copy from the lengthy trial which failed to materialize, journalists established and spiced up the morality play angle of Ellis’s story.”
But, Tweg notes, there was another side to the story.
Ellis “allowed herself to be arrested without resistance, confessed at once, and appeared hardly aware of what was happening. She tried to keep up appearances at her trial, but fatally misjudged how her freshly peroxided hair and painted nails would be interpreted by a conservative middle-class jury at the Old Bailey, clearly alienated by such a show of vulgarity.”
Tweg adds that “Having exploited the sordid side of Ruth Ellis’s image during her trial, some newspapers played up her end as romantic melodrama, constructing her death as ‘death wish.’ Such a reading was supported by the ‘chin-up’ heroic tone of Ellis’s last letters to friends from prison, in which she claimed she was satisfied to be dying for her lover.”
However, only later did it become clear that Ellis had suffered serious abuse by Blakely. As the Guardian reports, “According to accounts from Ellis, her friends, doctors and witnesses, she was assaulted in public, pushed down stairs, struck so hard on the ear she was briefly rendered deaf, caused to miscarry after being punched in the stomach, left bruised, and threatened with murder.”
Still, a posthumous exercise of the Royal Prerogative is an extraordinary and rare occurrence. And a commutation leaving a sentence of life in prison for an already dead person seems absurd, even if motivated by a desire to redress an historical wrong.
The passage of seven decades might have merited more mercy than that.
Still, it is important to recognize that only a few other people have received posthumous clemency from the British Monarch, with a couple receiving full pardons.
In 1966, Queen Elizabeth II pardoned Timothy Evans sixteen years after he was hanged for murdering his daughter, a crime he did not commit. Here clemency was really an act of justice, setting an innocent man free from the shame that he did not rightly deserve.
In 2003, the British Home Office went one better, compensating the Evans family financially for the miscarriage of justice in his case.
The Queen issued another posthumous clemency in 2013, this time to Alan Turing, a World War II hero who was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 for homosexual activity. According to the BBC, Turing “had been arrested after having an affair with a 19-year-old Manchester man. The conviction meant he lost his security clearance and had to stop the code-cracking work that had proved vital to the Allies in World War Two.”
Justice Secretary Chris Grayling described what happened to Turing this way: “[W]e would now consider [his conviction and punishment] unjust and discriminatory…. Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man.”
Following the Queen’s posthumous pardon of Turing, the British Parliament passed legislation purging posthumously the criminal records of thousands of men who had been convicted of homosexual acts that were, in 2017, no longer criminalized. At the time, Sam Gyimah, then Justice Minister, called what the Parliament did “truly momentous.”
He added, “We can never undo the hurt caused, but we have apologised and taken action to right these wrongs. I am immensely proud that ‘Turing’s law’ has become a reality under this government.”
In between Queen Elizabeth’s two full, posthumous pardons, she issued a conditional pardon to Derek Bentley, who was put to death in 1953 for his involvement in a murder. As the BBC tells it, “In 1952 Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old…was caught burgling a warehouse in London with a friend, Chris Craig. Craig was carrying a gun and Bentley carried a sheath knife and knuckleduster. When the police arrived to arrest both men, Bentley shouted ‘Let him have it, Chris’ and Craig fired the gun” killing a police officer.
“Bentley and Craig,” it continues, “were both charged with murder under a charge of joint enterprise. Bentley faced the death penalty if found guilty, but Craig did not because he was under the age of 18.” But, as in the Ellis case, there was more to the story.
At the time of his crime, Bentley had epilepsy, was cognitively impaired, and was illiterate. And almost immediately after his conviction, Bentley’s family began to try to clear his name. And a 1991 film, Let Him Have It, kept his case in the public eye.
All that set the stage for the posthumous clemency that set aside Bentley’s death sentence. And five years later, his conviction was overturned on the grounds that the trial judge had given erroneous jury instructions.
Like Evans and Turing, Bentley was not required “to serve” a lesser sentence from the grave. That is the fate that presently awaits Ruth Ellis.
As the Ministry of Justice explained on Wednesday, “The application for a pardon was brought by four of Ruth Ellis’s grandchildren. The application presented that her responsibility was profoundly shaped by domestic abuse, trauma and circumstances that were never properly recognised at her trial.”
“Lingering questions about her criminal actions, the handling of her trial, and her execution,” it went on, “helped to bring about the greatest change in criminal law the British judicial system had hitherto countenanced—the abolition of the mandatory death penalty for murder.”
Echoing what Gyimah said in 2017, on Wednesday, David Lammy told his parliamentary colleagues: “We cannot change what happened 70 years ago. But we can recognise that this was an exceptional case. Today’s conditional pardon is an act of mercy. We hope it brings some measure of peace to Ruth’s family.”
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| by Storm'n Norm'n |
However, it seems less about mercy than about justice. Ruth Ellis certainly deserved to have had the injustice of her sentence recognized, as the King did.
But mercy properly understood asks for something more, a reckoning that gives to those who receive it more than they deserve. And while I applaud what the King did in Ellis’s case, he did not give her that something more.
