Rabbi Eliezer asked the question nobody in the court could ignore: did Shimon ben Shetach not hang women in Ashkelon?
The answer, preserved in Sifrei Devarim 221:2, is yes. He hanged eighty women in one day. That should have been impossible under ordinary procedure. Capital cases were not supposed to be stacked together, and hanging was not the normal penalty being discussed. The sages answer with one sentence from (Psalms 119:126): it was a time to act for God, because Torah was being violated.
This is the frightening category later called hora'at sha'ah, an emergency ruling for a broken hour. The story is not permission for judges to love exceptions. It is a warning that exceptions can become necessary only when delay itself becomes betrayal. Shimon ben Shetach is remembered because the act was severe, public, and impossible to treat as routine.
The passage leaves the discomfort in place. It forces the reader to hold two truths at once: Jewish law guards procedure because human power is dangerous, and Jewish law also remembers rare moments when a leader believed the hour would collapse without immediate judgment. That tension is why Ashkelon stayed in the rabbinic memory.