Georgia Judge Stays Execution to Weigh Survivor Justice Act Claim

A Georgia judge has halted an execution set for Wednesday evening, ruling that the condemned man is entitled to a hearing on whether his sentence should be reduced under a new state law that allows survivors of abuse to have their punishments reconsidered.

Stacey Humphreys, 53, was convicted of malice murder in the 2003 killings of two real estate agents, 33-year-old Cyndi Williams and 21-year-old Lori Brown, in an Atlanta suburb. He had been scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the state prison near Jackson at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

Cobb County Superior Court Judge Tyler Browning issued the stay late Tuesday to allow a hearing under the Georgia Survivor Justice Act, signed this year by Gov. Brian Kemp. The law is aimed at helping survivors of domestic or child abuse, directing judges to resentence imprisoned people and to impose shorter penalties at sentencing if they can link their crimes to abuse they suffered.

In his ruling, Browning wrote that while the law "may make more logical sense as a legal vehicle exclusive to abuse victims who commit crimes against their abusers," its language is not limited to such cases.

During a hearing Tuesday, Humphreys' lawyer, Brian Kammer, told Browning that his client is a survivor of severe family violence and childhood abuse and "was severely damaged by this abuse and violence and it contributed significantly to his criminal behavior." Humphreys was beaten and whipped for years, burned with cigarettes and suffered a skull fracture at age 3 that went untreated, Kammer said. He was also routinely exposed to drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence among the adults around him.

Experts have testified that those abuses "did severe damage to his mental health" and "helped bring about the criminal behavior that brought Mr. Humphreys to his capital trial," Kammer told the judge. He argued that the Survivor Justice Act is meant "to protect survivors of childhood exposure to childhood family violence and child abuse of the kind suffered by Mr. Humphreys," adding that the case "really fits the bill."

Sabrina Graham, a lawyer with the attorney general's office, said the defense is effectively asking the court to commute two death sentences to a term of 10 to 30 years, and that nothing in the law permits such use. She argued that the legislative history shows the law was intended "for people who were the subject of abuse by the victims that they harmed."

Graham said the law was not meant to give people another chance to present mitigating evidence of abuse already presented at trial and seek resentencing on that basis. "There's nothing in the statute that says that says it applies to death row inmates," she said. "There's nothing in the statute that even remotely suggests that."

Using the law this way, she said, would "open up this door for all these people to come along and essentially get another bite at the apple and ask a trial court to serve essentially as the Board of Pardons and Paroles and commute a death sentence."

A lawyer with the state attorney general's office told the judge earlier Tuesday that the state intended to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court if a stay was granted, in hopes of keeping the execution on track. Browning wrote that if an appellate court rules before the scheduled execution time that Humphreys is not entitled to a hearing, he will consider lifting the stay so the execution can proceed.

The statute says a hearing should be granted unless "there is a lack of circumstantial guarantees of trustworthiness, an inherent unreliability of the facts asserted, or a deficiency in the factual allegations in the petition." If the court finds that the person was subjected to domestic or child abuse and those acts "were a significant contributing factor to the offense," the person should be resentenced, it says. "A person convicted of a crime punishable by death or by life imprisonment shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than ten years nor more than 30 years."