Then try reading more carefully!
Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis were hanged during the Conservative governments of the early 1950s. The Prime Minister at the time of Bentley's hanging was none other than Sir Winston Churchill, whom I don't think was noted for having any qualms whatever about capital punishment, and his successor, Sir Anthony Eden, had only been in the job 3 months when Ellis was hanged. I'm old enough to remember those times, and the Conservative Party was always known for the "hang 'em and flog 'em" mentality towards punishment of criminals, so to say that the government of that time wanted to end capital punishement is arrant nonsense.
Ruth Ellis's case polarised opinion, but hers was one of the clearest cases of guilt. She shot the victim in the street and confessed to it. Moreover she seemed eager to die. I very clearly recall a newspaper headline of the era quoting her as saying "I wanted to hang so I killed a man". Whether this quote was accurate or not is another matter, but regardless of that, having very recently had a miscarriage, there should have been every reason for commuting her sentence for reason for the balance of her mind being disturbed at the time. She was young and pretty, and attracted a lot of public interest, totally by contrast with the previous female to be hanged, only 7 months before Ruth, who was 53 and gained little press and no sympathy, and another woman of 44 had been hanged the year before. But because of the furore surrounding her execution and the general growth of abolitionist sentiments (but still very clearly a minority opinion) it seemed that there was little appetite for further execution of women, and so Ruth has the distinction of being the last.
Even after Eden, the successive Conservative prime ministers Macmillan and Home still routinely denied reprieves to murderers, and it was only the advent of Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1964 which brought abolition. It took some time for the law to be changed by Parliament, so judges were still obliged to pass sentence of death on most categories of murderers, but under Wilson these were automatically commuted to life imprisonment.
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