On the same day the state of Georgia issued a death warrant for Stacey Ian Humphreys, setting his execution for December 17, Gov. Brian Kemp announced his latest appointment to the Board of Pardons and Parole, the five-member body that would ultimately decide whether Humphreys would live or die.

The new member was Kim McCoy, previously a victims’ advocate at the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office. As the head of the Victim Witness Unit for 25 years, she offered dedicated support to victims’ family members “in capital cases and select high-profile cases,” according to her official bio.

One of those cases was Humphreys’s.

Humphreys was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for the notorious double murder of 21-year-old Lori Brown and 33-year-old Cyndi Williams. The two women were killed northwest of Atlanta; the shocking crime generated so much pretrial publicity that Humphreys’s trial was moved from Cobb County to Glynn County, nearly 300 miles away.

McCoy provided logistical and moral support to the victims’ families throughout the monthlong trial. Members of Humphreys’s defense team would later recall in affidavits that McCoy was extremely protective of them, blocking the legal team’s efforts to introduce themselves. “She was a pitbull,” one said.

The families were grateful for McCoy’s support. In a profile published in McCoy’s alma mater magazine the year after the trial, they praised her care and compassion. “Sometimes you see people who are tailor-made for a specific job,” one said. McCoy was that person.

“It is hard to imagine a greater conflict of interest in a clemency case.”

But her appointment to the pardon board on December 1 was another matter. Where Humphreys’s case was concerned, McCoy had a glaring conflict of interest. Although parole boards are often stacked with former prosecutors and law enforcement officials, making many clemency decisions little more than a rubber stamp, McCoy was a member of the very team that sent Humphreys to death row — one with an especially deep connection to his victims. As the lawyers would later write in a court filing, “it is hard to imagine a greater conflict of interest in a clemency case.”

McCoy was not the only board member with a connection to Humphreys’s case. Vice Chair Wayne Bennett was the Glynn County sheriff at the time of the trial, tasked with overseeing security and transportation for the sequestered jury — as well as Humphreys himself. To Humphreys’s attorneys, Bennett’s proximity to the victims, jurors, and defendant throughout the trial was too close for comfort. Under the board’s ethics rules, members are obligated to avoid even the appearance of bias. It was obvious to the lawyers that both McCoy and Bennett should recuse themselves from........

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