Two Cobb County women lost their lives because of a few thousand dollars, and soon the man convicted of killing them and taking their money is scheduled to meet his own end.
Eighteen years ago, Stacey Ian Humphreys was convicted of murder and other crimes in the 2003 deaths of Cindy Williams and Lori Brown.
His lawyers finally exhausted his appeals in October when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a move that inspired controversy, decided against him again after twice declining to hear his earlier appeals. That was after the Georgia Supreme Court had twice issued decisions that did not go his way.
On Dec. 17 at 7 p.m., Humphreys is to become the 55th Georgia inmate to die by lethal injection. He was born in 1973, the year Georgia reinstated capital punishment after a brief pause over litigation.
He was sentenced to death for the murders of two real estate agents during the lunch hour on Nov. 3, 2003. Williams was working in a construction company’s model home at a new Cobb County subdivision when Humphreys walked in.
Brown then entered during or after the attack on Williams.
The women’s bodies were found near their desks. They had both been stripped and shot in the head, according to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office.
Williams had been strangled with her own underwear and shot in her back and then her head. Brown had been choked or struck in the throat before she was shot.
Carr’s office detailed the evidence against Humphreys.
A felon on parole, he had skipped work that day and then missed a meeting with his parole officer four days later. Police caught him in Wisconsin five days after the double killing. Blood in his Dodge Durango and on a Ruger 9mm pistol recovered from the console contained DNA from the women.
Humphreys had gained access to their bank accounts before killing them, according to the attorney general’s office. By the time police caught up with him, $3,000 had been withdrawn from their accounts. Humphreys had deposited $1,000 in his own account and had about $800 in cash.
In September 2007, a jury convicted him of murder, assault, armed robbery and kidnapping. He pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a felon and was sentenced to death.
Then followed 18 years of legal maneuvers that finally ran their course on Oct. 21, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider Humphreys’ petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which had been denied by the U.S. district and appellate courts in Georgia.
The decision provoked a dissent by the three liberal justices, who said “extreme juror misconduct” had deprived Humphreys of his Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.
One juror had misled the court during jury selection, claiming she had been unharmed during an attempted rape but later confiding that she had, indeed, been assaulted, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in their dissent.
The other eleven jurors wanted to sentence Humphreys to life without parole, but this lone juror was relentless and her “misconduct appears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death,” Sotomayor wrote.
Ineffective counsel failed to raise the issue, and by the time new lawyers did, the Georgia Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was too late based on Georgia law.
Sotomayor wrote that by refusing to hear Humphreys’ case, the high court was “allowing a death sentence tainted by a single juror’s extraordinary misconduct to stand.”
Still, on Dec. 1, Cobb County District Attorney Sonya F. Allen informed Chief Superior Court Judge Ann B. Harris that all legal avenues to avoid execution had been traveled and that it was time to sign Humphreys’ death warrant.
Harris concurred, ordering his execution sometime during the week before Christmas.
Two days later, Tyrone Oliver, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections, announced the timing of Humphreys’ execution to occur at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson.
This article is available through a partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Association’s nonprofit, tax-exempt Educational Foundation.
