The Supreme Court on Monday refused to review the case of Stacey Humphreys, who was sentenced to death in Georgia after a single juror “bullied” the others into voting for death.
In an opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the Court’s decision “allowing a death sentence tainted by a single juror’s extraordinary misconduct to stand.”
Stacey Humphreys was charged with killing two women inside a model home after forcing them to undress and robbing them at gunpoint.
During jury selection for his trial in 2007, the dissent recounted, juror Chancey said a convicted murderer who had escaped from a mental institution attempted to rape and rob her in her home, but she escaped before he got inside the house. She swore under oath she could be a fair juror and would “honestly consider” all three sentencing options—life with parole, life without parole, and death.
The jury convicted Mr. Humphreys, and the State sought the death penalty.
During deliberations at the penalty phase, Chancey revealed to the other jurors that her attacker actually had assaulted her while she was naked in her bed. Based on that experience, the jury foreperson later reported, she “had her mind made up” from “day one” of trial that Mr. Humphreys “deserved to die.”
On the second day of deliberations, the other 11 jurors voted for life without parole, but “Chancey would not even consider it.” When the foreperson wrote a note to the trial judge reporting the jurors were “unable to come to a unanimous decision on either death or life imprisonment without parole as a sentence,” Chancey changed the note to avoid a mistrial, writing the jurors were “currently” unable to reach a decision.
The judge instructed the jury to keep deliberating, and Chancey “snapped”—she yelled, cursed, and screamed she would “stay here forever if” that’s what it took for Mr. Humphreys “to get death.” She threw the victims’ photos across the table, demanding, “Do you want this to happen to someone you know?” and reminded jurors of the similarities of her own attack. She falsely told them “they had to reach a unanimous decision or [Humphreys] would be paroled,” personally attacked them, and refused to engage in discussions.
People in the courtroom heard screaming from the jury room, and jurors were seen crying on several occasions. One juror “took a swing” at Chancey and punched a hole in the wall. Another juror said later that “it was as if an evil force took over” Chancey. The foreperson wrote a note to the judge asking to be removed from the jury because of the “hostile nature of one of the jurors.”
But rather than investigate, the trial judge instructed jurors to keep deliberating and rejected the defense’s motion for a mistrial. On the third morning of deliberations, the jury returned a unanimous verdict for death.
These facts show a likely violation of Mr. Humphreys’s Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury, the dissent explained. But the Georgia courts refused to consider this compelling evidence because the state’s “no-impeachment rule” prohibits the use of juror testimony to impeach a verdict, even in death penalty cases.
The no-impeachment rule exists in some form in every state, the dissent wrote, but the Supreme Court has recognized exceptions in the “gravest and most important” cases, such as when a “juror makes a clear statement that indicates he or she relied on racial stereotypes or animus to convict a criminal defendant.”
The Court has long held that the decision to impose the death penalty must meet the highest standards of reliability. Accordingly, the dissent wrote, the aims of the no-impeachment rule must be carefully weighed against “the constitutional requirement to ensure the impartiality of a death-empaneled jury.”
“Applying the no-impeachment rule too reflexively and restrictively risks a ‘systemic loss of confidence in jury verdicts,’” Justice Sotomayor warned, “and that is all the more imperative when the difference between life and death is at stake.”
Here, the dissent reasoned, because the juror’s extreme misconduct “appears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death,” the no-impeachment rule should yield.
But that was not the question raised in Mr. Humphreys’s petition for review, because his lawyers failed to raise a juror misconduct claim on direct appeal. Georgia’s supreme court thus refused to address the merits, holding the claim was procedurally defaulted, and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
Mr. Humphreys challenged the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in the Supreme Court, where the State created confusion about the basis for the appellate court’s decision and persuaded the Court to deny review.
The dissent protested that the Court should have vacated and remanded for clarification from the Eleventh Circuit “rather than leave Humphreys’s juror-misconduct claim caught in a web of procedural barriers.”
“In a capital case with a potentially meritorious juror-misconduct claim,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “mere confusion about a lower court’s reasoning does not justify closing the door to relief altogether.”