Judge halts Georgia execution to allow hearing for condemned man under new survivor justice law

ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia judge has put on hold an execution scheduled for Wednesday, saying the condemned prisoner is entitled to a hearing on whether his sentence should be reduced under a new state law that allows victims of abuse to have their sentences 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 was scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the state prison near Jackson at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

But Cobb County Superior Court Judge Tyler Browning issued a stay of execution late Tuesday to allow for a hearing provided for under the Georgia Survivor Justice Act.

The law, signed this year by Gov. Brian Kemp, is intended to help survivors of domestic or child abuse. It directs judges to resentence people who are in prison and to impose shorter penalties during sentencing if the person can tie their crimes to abuse they suffered.

In his ruling the judge wrote that while the law “may make more logical sense as a legal vehicle exclusive to abuse victims who commit crimes against their abusers,” the language of the law does not limit it to such cases.

A lawyer with the state attorney general’s office told the judge earlier in the day 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.

During a hearing Tuesday, Humphreys lawyer Brian Kammer told Cobb County Superior Court Judge Tyler 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 also was routinely exposed to drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence among the adults who surrounded 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.

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,” Kammer said, adding that his case “really fits the bill.”

Sabrina Graham, a lawyer with the attorney general's office, said Humphreys' defense is effectively asking the court to commute two death sentences to a 10- to 30-year sentence, nothing in the law allows it to be used in this manner and it is “not applicable.” She argued that the legislative history shows the law's purpose was “for people who were the subject of abuse by the victims that they harmed.”

The law was not intended to give people another chance to present mitigating evidence of abuse that was already presented at trial and ask a court for resentencing on that basis, Graham said.

“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, according to Graham, 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.”

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.”