(09-16) 12:34 PDT LONDON (AP) --
The case had all the ingredients to make it one of the
country's most memorable: A beautiful blonde nightclub
hostess, her dashing race car driver lover and a so-called
crime of passion that led Ruth Ellis to become the last woman
executed in Britain.
On Tuesday, lawyers delved into transcripts from the
decades-old trial to argue that Ellis was severely provoked
into killing lover David Blakely as he left a London pub in
1955, and that her murder conviction should be overturned.
Michael Mansfield, a lawyer acting for Ellis' surviving
family, told three senior judges in the Court of Appeal in
London that there was a miscarriage of justice at Ellis'
original trial because the judge rejected a defense of
provocation.
Mansfield used testimony from Ellis and others at that
trial to paint a picture of the hanged woman as someone who
was emotionally and physically abused by her lover. He argued
Ellis suffered from what is now characterized as "battered
woman syndrome."
"Were this trial to be allowed to occur today, the course
of the trial would be entirely different," Mansfield said as
he sought to have Ellis' conviction changed to the lesser
verdict of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation or
diminished responsibility.
"The jury should have been given the opportunity to decide
what was provocation and was reasonable in the circumstances,"
he added.
Ellis' 1955 trial lasted just over a day and the jury took
less than a half hour to reach its verdict.
Ellis, 28, never appealed the sentence, and three weeks
later she was hanged at Holloway Prison in north London while
around 1,000 people held a silent vigil outside.
The death penalty in Britain was suspended in 1965 and
permanently removed in 1970.
The Ellis case remains one of Britain's most famous. It has
inspired several books and a film, "Dance with a Stranger,"
starring Miranda Richardson as Ellis.
Mansfield said Ellis and Blakely had a tempestuous
relationship, with Blakely alternating affection with abuse.
Ten days before she shot him six times outside the Magdala pub
in northwest London, Ellis suffered a miscarriage after
Blakely, the baby's father, punched her in the stomach.
"This wasn't one or two incidents. This is plainly a
pattern of violence," Mansfield said.
He contended that Ellis "snapped" after a weekend during
which Blakely deserted her despite promises to take her out,
and ignored her telephone calls and attempted visits.
"It was obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill
him," Ellis testified at her trial. Mansfield argued that the
intent did not rule out the defense of provocation.
But Lord Justice Kay noted that 50 years ago a defense of
provocation meant a "sudden and temporary loss of control." He
asked how that could apply to Ellis, who carried her gun for
90 minutes before shooting.
Mansfield said the question should have been left to the
jury.
David Perry, the lawyer acting for the Crown Prosecution
Service, maintained there was no unfair trial on the basis of
the law as it then existed.
It was not a crime of passion, but a "calm, deliberate,
premeditated killing," he said.
Ellis' sister, 81-year-old Muriel Jakubait, said outside
the court that she believes she is fulfilling her sister's
dying wish by pursuing the appeal.
"She always said the truth would come out and that is what
we have been trying to do," Jakubait said.
A medical expert is scheduled to give evidence Wednesday,
the second and last day of the hearing. A ruling is to be
delivered at a later date.
In recent years, several convictions have been overturned
decades after the alleged murderers were executed.
Last June, the 1949 murder conviction of George Kelly was
overturned after the discovery of a document proving a key
witness had made a statement implicating another man. Kelly
was hanged in 1949.
In 1998, the Appeal Court overturned the conviction of
Derek Bentley, who was executed in 1953 for the murder of a
policeman, faulting the judge's summation. That same year,
appeals judges overturned the conviction of Mahmood Hussein
Mattan, a Somali hanged in 1952 for the murder of a
shopkeeper, ruling the main witness against him -- who was
later convicted of murdering his own daughter -- was
unreliable.
