Jon Yorke is Professor of Human Rights at Birmingham City University. He is a Member of the Foreign Secretary’s Expert Panel on the Death Penalty and has been a consultant for the United Nations and the European Union, advising on death penalty issues. |Jon Yorke is Professor of Human Rights at Birmingham City University. He is a Member of the Foreign Secretary’s Expert Panel on the Death Penalty and has been a consultant for the United Nations and the European Union, advising on death penalty issues.
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Alabama’s Manifest Injustice and the Inhumanity of Execution by Nitrogen Gas Inhalation
On 25 January Alabama intends to be the first US state to use nitrogen gas inhalation as an execution method. Despite a manifestly unjust trial, the presence of convincing science against this new method, and globally accepted human ...
Glossip v Gross: Taking Up Justice Breyer’s Call to Question the Death Penalty
Last month the United States Supreme Court ruled in Glossip v. Gross 135 S. Ct. 2726 (2015) that the use of midazolam in Oklahoma’s injection protocol was not unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. However, in his dissenting ...
Glossip v. Gross: SCOTUS Affirmation of Underdeveloped Science for the Lifeline of the Death Penalty
On 29 June 2015, in Glossip v. Gross 576 U. S. ____ (2015), Justice Alito gave the majority opinion (joined by Roberts C.J., and Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas, J.J.), which grasped onto the wavering tautology that because the death ...
Glossip v. Gross: SCOTUS to Consider Oklahoma’s Lethal Injection Protocol
On Friday 23rd January, 2015, the US Supreme Court granted three Oklahoma death row inmates certiorari to challenge the state’s three-drug lethal injection protocol. In Baze v. Rees 553 U.S. 35 (2008), it was held that an execution ...
Meriam Ibrahim is Freed: Weaving together Law, Politics and Civil Society
This post is the second part of a two-part report by Professor Jon Yorke, following the litigation surrounding Meriam Ibrahim. The first part can be found here.
On 22 June 2014, the Court of Appeal, Khartoum North and ...
Meriam Ibrahim Saved from 100 Lashes and the Death Penalty
On 11 May 2014, Meriam Yahia Ibrahim was found guilty by the Al-Haj Yousif Criminal Court of charges under the Sudanese Penal Code (1991), Articles 126 for the crime of ridda (apostasy from Islam) and 146 for the crime of zena ...
Executing the Intellectually Disabled: a Stronger Prohibition
On 21 February 1978, Freddie Hall and his accomplice, kidnapped, raped and murdered a young woman, and in a separate incident, killed a sheriff’s deputy. Hall’s siblings, teachers, and the Florida sentencing judge acknowledged that ...
