<\/p>\n
More than a<\/span> week after the Lindsay Clancy trial ended in a hung jury \u2014 with a lone holdout refusing to acquit the 36-year-old for killing her young children \u2014 the media has continued to probe how one man forced a mistrial in the triple-murder case. \u201cI hope that guy can sleep well at night,\u201d Clancy\u2019s defense attorney told<\/a> reporters. \u201cWhatever his agenda was, he stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, to failure to pay rent<\/a>.<\/p>\n The attention devoted to the Clancy trial \u2014 and the wave of anger over the juror\u2019s intransigence \u2014 stands in sharp contrast with the silence over a different murder case, which is about to culminate in an execution.<\/p>\n At the Georgia death penalty trial of Stacey Humphreys, who was convicted of committing a double murder, a lone juror \u201cappears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death,\u201d U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote<\/a> last year. The woman\u2019s actions, she concluded, amounted to \u201cextreme juror misconduct.\u201d Yet the high court has refused to consider Humphreys\u2019s case \u2014 and media attention on the upcoming execution has been virtually nonexistent.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole legal commentariat weighed in on what happens when a juror didn\u2019t follow the rules in the Clancy trial,\u201d organizer Hannah Riley Fernandez, director of programming at the Center for Just Journalism, wrote<\/a> on social media, \u201cmeanwhile GA is about to kill someone whose juror did the same & MUCH more.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Humphreys was sentenced<\/span> 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\u2019s department escorted jurors between a Holiday Inn and the courthouse.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201csomething along the lines of \u2018he\u2019s guilty and he deserves to die.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Most of the jurors were inclined to agree with Chancey at first. But at Humphreys\u2019s sentencing trial, defense lawyers revealed their client\u2019s 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. \u201cThis testimony was impactful to the jurors tasked with balancing Stacey\u2019s terrible crime and the rage-filled, abusive household where he grew up,\u201d lawyers later wrote in his clemency petition.<\/p>\n Juror affidavits described a sense of grief for family members on both sides. One said she\u2019d been especially struck by the testimony of Humphreys\u2019s older sister Dayna, who recalled how her brother \u201ctook most of the beatings for her.\u201d 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 life without parole. Only Chancey was opposed.<\/p>\n After hours of additional deliberation, the foreperson wrote a note to the trial judge saying that they were \u201cunable to come to a unanimous decision on either death or life imprisonment without parole.\u201d Under Georgia law, a judge faced with a non-unanimous decision is supposed to dismiss the jury and sentence a defendant to either life or life without parole. But Chancey insisted on editing the note, revising it to include the word \u201ccurrently\u201d in two separate places, which left the impression that jurors might eventually agree. Upon receiving the note, the trial judge directed jurors to keep deliberating.<\/p>\n After that, a member of the jury later said in an affidavit, Chancey \u201csnapped.\u201d Fellow jurors said she screamed and threw photos of the deceased victims at them, demanding to know whether they \u201cwant this to happen to someone you know.\u201d Things got so contentious that the foreperson sent another note asking to be removed from the case due to Chancey\u2019s \u201chostile\u201d behavior. But the judge again directed them to keep working.<\/p>\n Chancey did not respond to The Intercept\u2019s requests for comment.<\/p>\n Chancey also revealed something to her fellow jurors during deliberations that she had kept hidden from the court during voir dire. While she\u2019d previously disclosed that she had been the victim of an attempted armed robbery of her home but that she\u2019d escaped before the perpetrator was able to get inside, she later told fellow jurors that he assaulted her in her bed. Had Chancey revealed this during jury selection, lawyers have argued, she would almost certainly been struck from the panel.<\/p>\n Instead, Chancey was seated on the jury and hijacked the deliberations. According to other jurors, she said that they had to vote unanimously on a sentence or Humphreys might eventually walk free. Confusing instructions from the judge deepened this misimpression, according to the foreperson. Along with the rest, she ultimately capitulated and changed her vote to death. \u201cI cried the entire time,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Humphreys, now 52,<\/span> is scheduled to die by lethal injection on September 16 at 7 p.m. He is one of two people set to be executed this week, despite the fact that a majority of their trial jurors wished to show mercy. On September 17, Alabama plans to kill Jeffery Lee, whose jury voted 7 to 5 to sentence him to life without parole. At the time of Lee\u2019s trial, Alabama judges had the power to override a jury\u2019s decision. Despite the jury\u2019s vote, Lee was sentenced to die.<\/p>\n Several national outlets have covered Lee\u2019s plight<\/a>. But Humphreys\u2019s looming execution remains overlooked. One reason may be that the legal issues are technical and complex \u2014 a \u201cprocedural thicket,\u201d as Sotomayor described it, that has prevented any court from addressing the disastrous deliberations at Humphreys\u2019s trial.<\/p>\n In Georgia and other states, courts are not supposed to allow juror affidavits to undermine a verdict, with some narrow exceptions. Humphreys\u2019s lawyers learned about Chancey\u2019s behavior soon after the trial and obtained affidavits anyway, seeking to challenge the death sentence on direct appeal. But rather than argue that juror misconduct violated his right to a fair trial, they argued that the judge\u2019s instruction to keep deliberating was coercive. <\/p>\n When state post-conviction lawyers later sought to argue that Chancey committed misconduct, Georgia courts ruled that it was too late: Because Humphreys had never sought to argue the claim, his attorneys were now barred from doing so. Similar procedural barriers then prevented Humphreys\u2019s federal legal team from bringing the challenge into federal court.<\/p>\n Humphreys was scheduled to be executed last December<\/a>, but was temporarily spared amid a separate legal fight over alleged conflicts of interest<\/a> by members of Georgia\u2019s Board of Pardons and Paroles. Among the five members with the power to decide whether Humphrey would live or die were two people involved in the trial. One had worked as a victims\u2019 advocate; another was the former sheriff of the county where the trial took place.<\/p>\n An Atlanta judge agreed that the board member who had worked as a victims\u2019 advocate had a conflict of interest but disagreed about the ex-sheriff. He ultimately concluded that the clemency board could simply move forward without the former. Humphreys\u2019s lawyers describe this as both unprecedented in Georgia and unfair to their client. Humphreys \u201cwill not only be required to convince three out of four presiding Board members,\u201d they argue, \u201che will be judged by the very Board members that only last December were adverse parties in his legal action.\u201d<\/p>\n