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WAS Ruth Ellis badly treated by the British criminal justice system? Was she hanged less for shooting racing driver David Blakely than because she was a bleached blonde hussy who flagrantly breached society's rules of decorum? Of course she was. There can't be more than a handful of people left in the country who think otherwise.
Even in 1955, most people felt uneasy when the then Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd-George, refused to grant her a reprieve from the executioner. Her death that year cast a long shadow over even the most ardent supporters of the death penalty. Nor is there any dispute over the slipshod nature of Ellis's trial - it lasted less than a day, and important facts about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Blakely and her father were not revealed to the court.
Despite all this, I cannot help but feel the appeal, heard last week, has been a waste of public time and money. To me, the contention that, properly directed and presented with all the available evidence, the original jury would have returned a not guilty verdict is far from watertight.
It may seem as if the impact of domestic violence on a woman has long been recognised, but the notion of 'cumulative provocation' - that the jury should be asked to consider not only the events on the day of the murder, but the years of abuse that led up to it - was not accepted by a court until 1995, when Emma Humphreys, jailed for killing her violent pimp, was freed on appeal. And it is only seven months since judges hearing the Kim Galbraith appeal ruled it was no longer necessary for lawyers to prove the defendant was suffering from a 'mental disease'...