Ruth Ellis was hanged at Holloway Prison, London, in July 1955, the last woman to be executed in Britain. The case against her rested almost entirely on eyewitness testimony and her own confession — she made no attempt to deny the shooting. The subsequent public debate about capital punishment and the reliability of the system that convicted her contributed directly to the abolition of the death penalty in Britain in 1965. Her case also raised questions about how domestic violence evidence was (or was not) considered in criminal proceedings.

Ruth Ellis became an iconic figure in British literary and feminist writing about crime, justice, and the treatment of women by the criminal evidence system. Her case inspired novels, poems, and plays that examined how women's testimony about domestic abuse was systematically discounted as evidence in court. The campaign for her exoneration or posthumous pardon continued into the twenty-first century and intersected with feminist poetry about the criminal justice system's gendered treatment of evidence.