Stacey Humphries was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, Dec. 17, for the murders of 21-year-old Lori Brown and 33-year-old Cindy Williams. This is currently on hold, and it is unclear whether it will materialize or not.
US expands death penalty methods
In modern history, most death row inmates faced one method of execution. There are now many other ways to die.
A Georgia commission has halted the execution of a death row inmate who attacked two real estate agents while they were working in 2003, stripped them naked and shot them execution-style.
Stacey Humphries, 52, was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday, Dec. 17, for the double murder of 21-year-old Lori Brown and 33-year-old Cindy Williams, who were murdered at a business in the Atlanta suburb of Powder Springs just before the holidays.
The state Board of Pardons and Parole issued an order Monday halting Humphries’ execution without explanation.
The Georgia Attorney General’s Office did not respond to an email late Monday asking whether prosecutors would try to resume executions as scheduled before Humphrey’s death warrant expires on Christmas Eve. If the plan is not changed by then, the state will have to seek a new death warrant.
Here’s what you need to know about this crime and why Humphries’ death penalty has been delayed almost 20 years since his conviction.
What was Stacey Humphries convicted of?
On November 3, 2003, Lori Brown, 21, and Cindy Williams, 33, were working in a business office located in a model home in a new subdivision in Cobb County.
Around 12:40 p.m., while Brown was out, Humphries came in and found Williams alone. At gunpoint, Humphries forced Williams to remove her clothes, hand over her debit card and give her PIN number, according to the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.
At one point, Humphries pushed Williams to the ground behind a desk. As she lay face down, the man shot her in the back, then shot her in the head, prosecutors said.
During or shortly after, Brown entered the office and Humphries immediately attacked him. He also forced Brown to remove his clothes and hand over his debit card and PIN number, then pushed him to the ground and shot him in the back of the head, prosecutors said.
Construction workers at the site soon encountered the body.
Following information from a witness who saw Humphries and his truck at the crime scene, police attempted to arrest him at his grandmother’s home, where he lived. However, Humphries was able to escape and fled more than 1,300 miles north to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was arrested after a high-speed chase with police.
In the days following the murders and before his arrest, Humphries withdrew more than $3,000 from the women’s accounts. Prosecutors said the man used some of the money to buy a new Dodge Durango truck for $565, took out a high-interest payday loan and told police, “That stinky truck gave me a headache.”
There was no evidence that Brown or Williams had been sexually assaulted. According to an archived Associated Press article, Humphries told police he had read that if a woman was naked, she could be stopped during a robbery.
Mark Serra, prosecuting the case, told jurors at the time that Humphries had an “abandoned malignant heart.”
“It’s all about money,” Celia said of the 2007 incident, according to an archived article in the Florida Times Union, part of the USA TODAY network. “They had to die so he could pay for the truck.”
Why did the parole board halt Humphries’ execution?
The state Pardons and Parole Board’s decision to halt Humphries’ execution came without explanation.
But two members of the board have conflicts of interest, potentially tied to claims by Humphries’ lawyers that they should not be involved in deciding whether to grant him clemency. The inmate had a clemency hearing scheduled for Tuesday before the board, but that was also canceled.
Humphries’ attorney argued Monday in District Court that one of the board members, Kimberly McCoy, is a former victim advocate who worked on Humphries’ case, WANF-TV reported. Lawyers pointed out that another member, Wayne Bennett, was the sheriff of the county where the trial was held at the time.
The state claims McCoy has already agreed to abstain from voting on whether Humphries deserves a pardon, and Bennett testified Monday that he was not directly involved in the bond provided during the trial and that its connection to the case had no bearing on his decision, the news station reported.
The Stacey Humphries case also took a notable turn at the Supreme Court.
Stacey Humphries’ lawyers have also argued in recent months that she was wrongly sentenced to death due to jury misconduct in her trial. This issue was argued all the way to the Supreme Court.
Initially, only one juror wanted to sentence Humphries to death. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion in October after a majority rejected Humphries’ request to overturn the death penalty, saying the jury “misleadingly omitted important details about his own experience as a victim of similar crimes” during jury selection and “used that past experience to bully fellow jurors into voting for the death penalty.”
In a dissent joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Kentangi Brown Jackson, Sotomayor described the jury’s misconduct as “extreme” and said it “appears to have single-handedly changed the sentence from life in prison without parole to the death penalty.”
The juror said: “She screamed, swore and screamed that if Humphriest was sentenced to death, she would ‘stay here forever’.”
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, jury deliberations almost completely collapsed,” Sotomayor wrote. “Screams could be heard coming from the courtroom. One of the jurors ‘swinged’ at (her) and punched a hole in the wall. Jurors were also seen crying on several occasions.”
Sotomayor said he believes the matter should be heard in a lower court for reconsideration.
What are the victims’ families saying?
USA TODAY has not been able to reach the families of Brown and Williams to learn more about who they are.
Lori Brown’s father, Wayne Brown, ran a newspaper ad in 2005 complaining that Humphries’ case was moving too slowly, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. In 2007, just shy of the four-year anniversary of the murder, he was among the victim’s family members who wept and hugged each other after a jury sentenced Humphries to death.
“Any sentence other than the death penalty for this crime would send a message to future murderers…We’ll just clap your hands and send you to your room,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
Williams’ sister, Terry Marks Brunner, said the death sentence is “the next step in healing,” but there is still a lot of room for healing.
She said, “There’s always going to be a hole there.”
Brown’s mother, Linda Brown, posted on Facebook about how the murder changed her world forever.
“I cried buckets of tears…I can honestly say that without the grace of my God, I would not have been able to accomplish it,” she wrote. “Time has helped, but not a day goes by that I don’t think about Lori Brown. All six feet of her. I miss her so much. I really wish she was back with me.”
She wished her daughter Angel a happy birthday in another post, writing, “I love you forever.”
When is the next execution?
On Thursday, Dec. 18, Florida is scheduled to execute Frank Asen Walls, a serial killer who murdered four women and one man from 1985 to 1987, but police say was sexually motivated.
Walls will be the 47th inmate to be executed in the United States this year, a number not reached since 2009. Death penalty experts blame the rise in death row inmates on the political climate under pro-death penalty President Donald Trump and a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.
Walls also became the 19th inmate to be executed in Florida this year, breaking the state’s previous record of eight executions set in 1984 and 2014.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has signed more death warrants than any other state in state history, said in May that he wanted to bring an end to families who have waited, sometimes decades, for their loved ones’ killers to be put to death.
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter covering cold case investigations and capital punishment for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.
