Joy Angelia Gardner (née Burke, 29 May 1953 – 1 August 1993) was a 40-year-old Jamaican mature student living in London, England, United Kingdom.

[1] Gardner died after being detained during a police immigration raid on her home in Crouch End, when she was restrained with handcuffs and leather straps and gagged with a 13-foot length of adhesive tape wrapped around her head.

[5] The case became a cause célèbre for civil rights and justice campaigners, and for the first time brought wide public attention to what the Modern Law Review called "the inhumanity of the methods used routinely in the execution of deportation orders".

[9] Her mother, Myrna Simpson, emigrated to the United Kingdom from Jamaica – then still a British colony – in 1961, with the intention of sending for her child once she had achieved some financial stability, a common and accepted practice at the time.

[14][16] While living in the UK, Gardner moved home several times but remained in contact with the police, her mother's local MP Bernie Grant and immigration services.

[15][16] On 28 July 1993, the day the police raided Gardner's home, Charles Wardle's immigration officer procrastinated to serve deportation order to Dervish her representative.

Wardle, the immigration minister, later admitted that the letters were held back and timed to arrive after the raid to prevent any further judicial appeals being made and to avoid giving Gardner any notice of her deportation, which was to take place at 3.00pm the same day from Heathrow Airport.

[19] They were tasked with accompanying officials from the UK Immigration Service - who had no power of arrest - who were serving deportation orders where violent resistance by the deportee was considered probable.

[25] A key part of the defence case was that Gardner's death was caused by head trauma sustained as she violently resisted the officers and not as a direct result of the tape used to gag her.

[3] As a result of Gardner's death, the use of mouth gags was suspended by the Commissioner of the MPS in August 1993 and banned by Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, in January 1994.

The defendant was acquitted when forensic pathologist Iain West testified that the post mortem examination had been so "cack-handed" that the bruising may have been inflicted by Lannas, and the prosecution informed the jury that her conclusions were "suspect" and could not be relied on as evidence.

[35] A 2001 disciplinary tribunal alleged that Lannas's pathology work "consistently fell substantially short" of expected standards and there were "substantive deficiencies" in "her technical approach and medical knowledge.