Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

A Lone Juror Hijacked Deliberations. This Time, a Man Faces Execution.

While many fixated on the man who refused to acquit Lindsay Clancy, Georgia is set to kill Stacey Humphreys despite “extreme juror misconduct.”

More than a week after the Lindsay Clancy trial ended in a hung jury — with a lone holdout refusing to acquit the 36-year-old for killing her young children — the media has continued to probe how one man forced a mistrial in the triple-murder case. “I hope that guy can sleep well at night,” Clancy’s defense attorney told reporters. “Whatever his agenda was, he stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors.”

Commentators have been strikingly sympathetic toward Clancy, showing compassion for her struggle with severe postpartum mental illness. Meanwhile, the unnamed juror, who is Black, has been widely criticized for allegedly violating his duty to follow the law. The press has dug into his own criminal history, from reports of domestic abuse, which were dismissed, to failure to pay rent.

The attention devoted to the Clancy trial — and the wave of anger over the juror’s intransigence — stands in sharp contrast with the silence over a different murder case, which is about to culminate in an execution.

At the Georgia death penalty trial of Stacey Humphreys, who was convicted of committing a double murder, a lone juror “appears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote last year. The woman’s actions, she concluded, amounted to “extreme juror misconduct.” Yet the high court has refused to consider Humphreys’s case — and media attention on the upcoming execution has been virtually nonexistent.

“The whole legal commentariat weighed in on what happens when a juror didn’t follow the rules in the Clancy trial,” organizer Hannah Riley Fernandez, director of programming at the Center for Just Journalism, wrote on social media, “meanwhile GA is about to kill someone whose juror did the same & MUCH more.”

Humphreys was sentenced to die in 2007 for murdering two real estate agents, 21-year-old Lori Brown and 33-year-old Cyndi Williams, at a model home just outside Atlanta. Pretrial publicity led to a change of venue, and the jury was sequestered over the course of the monthlong trial. The local sheriff’s department escorted jurors between a Holiday Inn and the courthouse.

The story of what happened in the jury room is contained in years of legal filings and affidavits signed by investigators and jurors themselves. The jury foreperson was repeatedly interviewed by Humphreys’s defense team and testified in court. She described how the lone holdout, Linda Chancey, signaled her intentions even before the jury had voted to convict Humphreys, announcing “something along the lines of ‘he’s guilty and he deserves to die.’”

Most of the jurors were inclined to agree with Chancey at first. But at Humphreys’s sentencing trial, defense lawyers revealed their client’s harrowing upbringing. From the time he was a toddler, witnesses said, Humphreys had been brutally abused by his parents, leading to psychological problems that indelibly shaped the rest of his life. “This testimony was impactful to the jurors tasked with balancing Stacey’s terrible crime and the rage-filled, abusive household where he grew up,” lawyers later wrote in his clemency petition.

Juror affidavits described a sense of grief for family members on both sides. One said she’d been especially struck by the testimony of Humphreys’s older sister Dayna, who recalled how her brother “took most of the beatings for her.” Despite an initial internal vote in which several jurors favored a death sentence, they eventually agreed that he could be sufficiently punished without being executed. On the second day of deliberations, 11 jurors voted for........

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