On the same Wednesday night, two men convicted of multiple murders faced execution in two states. One got a last-minute reprieve. The other is almost certain to die. The difference wasn't the severity of the crime — it was the state line and which judge happened to draw the case.

Stacey Humphreys, 53, was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. EDT at the state prison near Jackson, Georgia, for the 2003 murders of two real estate agents in an Atlanta suburb. A judge issued a stay late Tuesday after Humphreys' lawyers filed a petition under a new Georgia law allowing resentencing for abuse victims who can tie their crimes to past suffering. LeJames Norman, 40, was set to die at 6 p.m. CDT in Huntsville, Texas, for the 2005 shooting deaths of three people during a botched robbery in the rural town of Edna. His appeals were exhausted. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted Monday against commuting his sentence or granting even a 90-day reprieve.

Both men committed brutal crimes. According to court records, Norman and an accomplice believed there was cocaine in the house. They never found any. Celso Lopez was shot four times, including three shots to the back of his head. Tiffani Peacock, 18, was shot twice in the head. Samuel Roberts, 24, was shot five times to the chest, neck and head. Norman pleaded guilty to capital murder and fled to Mexico before being arrested five months later trying to cross back into the U.S. His accomplice, Ker'Sean Ramey, was also convicted and sentenced to death; his execution is set for next week.

Humphreys, meanwhile, walked into a model home sales office in Powder Springs around midday on November 3, 2003, forced two women — Cyndi Williams, 33, and Lori Brown, 21 — to strip naked and hand over their bank PINs, then shot them both dead. He withdrew more than $3,000 from their accounts. He told police he needed the money for a truck payment after taking out high-interest payday loans. He fled to Wisconsin and was arrested after a high-speed chase.

The AJC reported that Humphreys' lawyers have argued he was denied a fair resentencing process, claiming a biased juror was allowed onto the jury and that his trial attorneys failed to properly investigate his background. They also raised a conflict-of-interest question about the Cobb County Board of Pardons and Paroles, which denied his clemency application — the district attorney's office reportedly had a member on the board. The Guardian and WTOP noted only that the stay came under the new abuse-resentencing law.

Norman's attorneys asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied a stay based on claims about prosecutorial misconduct. In 2017, the Supreme Court already refused to review an appeal raising questions about the competence of his trial attorneys.

Florida, the nation's busiest death chamber, accounts for more than half of the 25 executions carried out in the U.S. this year. Texas has executed five; Georgia, zero. The outcomes for Humphreys and Norman had nothing to do with which man deserved death more and everything to do with which procedural lever happened to be available in which jurisdiction on which night. That's not justice. That's a lottery.