A conditional posthumous pardon has been granted to Ruth Ellis, who was executed in the UK in 1955 and is widely described as the last woman to be hanged in Britain. The decision commutes her sentence from execution to life imprisonment.

The pardon is framed as a belated correction of historical injustice, following decades of campaigning by Ellis’s family. Reporting on the case has focused on claims that Ellis was subject to sustained domestic abuse by her partner before she killed him, and that the impact of that abuse was not properly reflected in the proceedings at the time.

The development comes years after legal reviews and appeals related to Ellis’s case, and it marks a rare use of the pardon power after capital punishment had long been abolished in the UK for murder.