8 July 2026 - 5:40pm
Earlier today, with absolutely no other outstanding issue to fix within the English criminal justice system, Lord Chancellor David Lammy announced that he had advised the King to grant a conditional pardon to Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom.
Ellis was, of course, guilty of murder, not that she made it very hard to come to this conclusion. At her trial in 1955, prosecutor Christmas Humphreys asked: “When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?” Ellis replied: “It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.” The jury took 20 minutes to return a verdict, presumably to have another cup of tea.
Lammy’s solution was to give her a conditional pardon: instead of being hanged by the neck until she was dead, and may God have mercy on her soul, he re-sentenced her to life imprisonment. But even the royal prerogative cannot bring Ellis back from the dead, and so one is left wondering what the point of this little farce is.
A conditional pardon to a living person modifies the penal consequences that the law imposes upon them, which is obviously valuable. A free pardon to a dead person vindicates their honour, which also has its value. But a reduction of sentence for someone who has already been hanged is obviously pointless, neither restoring their freedom nor their honour. Instead, it is a surrender to the twee sentimentalism and the culture of “campaigners” who harass ministers until they give up and grant them whatever it is that they wanted.
It’s not as if Ellis’s supporters didn’t have their time in court: in 2003, they managed to have her case referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which is intended to correct miscarriages of justice.
In the end, the Court sent her case packing, with the judgment stating: “We have to question whether this exercise of considering an appeal so long after the event when Mrs Ellis herself had consciously and deliberately chosen not to appeal at the time is a sensible use of the limited resources of the Court of Appeal.” It added that Ellis had “committed a serious criminal offence” and that “if we had not been obliged to consider her case we would perhaps in the time available have dealt with 8 to 12 other cases, the majority of which would have involved people who were said to be wrongly in custody.”
Of course, governments have to engage in the occasional spot of populism, but Lammy’s explanation for his decision to recommend the pardon brings the entire criminal justice system into contempt. “We cannot rewrite history, the Justice Secretary said, “but today’s act of mercy recognises those circumstances and honours her memory.”
“Honours her memory”? Of a woman he has re-sentenced to life imprisonment, the most severe sanction the British state can give out in a court of justice? If Lammy thought Ellis’s memory should be honoured, the least he could have done is to quash her conviction for murder. As things stand, we have an ostensibly law-and-order minister telling the British public that he is honouring the memory of a murderer.
It is probably pointless to overthink this pardon. Lammy decided that a pardon for Ellis would give him some good publicity, and doubtless it has among the sort of people who are convinced that every single person hanged between, say, 1950 and the abolition of hanging for murder is the victim of a miscarriage of justice. This, however, is not how a serious government behaves.
