RUTH ELLIS
T 4 HERE is evidence here of extreme emotional tension of the accused woman as a result of which she did what she did.' Those were the words of Mr. Christmas Humphreys, the chief Prosecuting Counsel at the trial of Mrs. Ellis. What were the chief factors in this 'extreme emotional tension' so far as they are known to us?
The first factor is that Mrs. Ellis had a miscarriage 13 days before the murder. She had been pregnant by Blakely, the man whom she murdered, and it is very probable that the mis- carriage was caused by his punching her in the stomach. What- ever the cause, it is well known that a miscarriage can have the most devastating effect upon the mental state of a woman. Putting it at its very lowest, it cannot be denied that a fortnight after a miscarriage a woman is not mentally normal.
Secondly there was the extraordinary, ambivalent relation- ship between Blakely and Mrs. Ellis. 'You may think,' said Mr. Justice Havers to the jury, '[this] young woman [was] badly treated by the deceased man.' That was putting it mildly. It is distasteful to have to say such things about a dead man, but he was often violent with her and frequently beat her; he lived on her; he constantly deceived her. On the Wednesday before the murder there was an apparently complete reconciliation; yet on the Friday he left her and refused to see her throughout the last weekend. There is no question that in law she was perfectly sane and responsible for her actions—but neither is there any question that throughout that last weekend she was in a state of utter desperation and no longer subject to ordinary inhibitions.
Thirdly, Mrs. Ellis was suffering from such extreme jealousy at the time of the murder as in some other countries leads to a very different view of her crime. Little can be said here under this head because of the laws of libel. Suffice it to say that a former mistress of Blakely's could have come forward and told a.story which would have done much to explain though not to excuse Mrs. Ellis's action. She did not do so, but there is every reason to believe that the facts were well known to the Home Secretary. • Fourthly, Mrs. Ellis was an alcoholic—reprehensible cer- tainly and not made much less so by its being largely caused by Blakely's ill-treatment of her. But our courts are not courts of morals, nor is the Home Office, and alcoholism notoriously dulls the moral sense.
Any one of the first three factors should have been enough to secure a reprieve. Taken together they surely made the case for a reprieve overwhelming. But there were other extraneous circumstances which strengthened the case for. a reprieve. Mrs. Ellis was the mother of two young children. When we put this fact forward a fortnight ago as a ground for reprieve, we were not asking, as a correspondent alleged, that she should be freed to bring them up. We were thinking of the effect upon them when they find out, as they assuredly will, what happened to their mother. As the Observer pointed out, somebody must try to explain it to them some time. Again, as The Economist pointed out, the morbid interest in Mrs. Ellis and whether or not she should hang was so great as to make it desirable that her execution should not take place. (Consider the remark, quoted in last week's People, made across the bar to the execu- tioner in his public-house : 'How did you get on with your girl friend?') Even if it is forgotten that a reprieve is nothing exceptional and that the proportion even of male murderers to be reprieved is very nearly 50 per cent, the case for a reprieve seems un- answerable and yet the Home Secretary refused it. Some of our readers, not all of them supporters of capital punishment, have written to complain about our observations on the Home Secre- tary's decision. It should scarcely be necessary to point out that our attack on Mr. Lloyd George last week was not, and this week is not, on his personal character but on his behaviour as a Minister. We cannot know what caused him to reach the decision he did. There is no doubt that he reached it only after long and anxious consideration. (We gave our grounds last week for thinking that he had not given the same anxious con- sideration to the question of capital punishment in general.) Almost certainly, as we surmised last week, it was reached under pressure from his advisers. In any event it seems to us that the case for a reprieve was overwhelming and that the Home Secretary's refusal to grant it was appalling.
If we think that the Home Secretary was at fault, was it wrong to criticise him? Many people think that the power of life and death which is vested in the Home Secretary is so onerous that his discharge of it should not be criticised. This view would be irrefutable if the man who exercised this power were in each particular case chosen by lot. But the Home Secre- tary is not an ordinary citizen chosen by chance. He is an ordinary politician who, if he thinks the duty intolerable, can refuse to undertake it. He is an ordinary politician who expects his other activities to be scrutinised and criticised, and there seems small reason for putting a taboo on criticism of one of the most important of his functions.
The case of Ruth Ellis is another of those instances, some of which we specified in an article earlier in the year, where the prerogative of mercy has broken down. Those who still approve of capital punishment have just as great a cause for concern about this as those of us who oppose it as a preposterous and revolting atrocity. The obvious remedy is to abolish hanging. Even those who do not agree cannot be content with the present position.
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