Fifty years ago today, the United States Supreme Court handed down one of the most consequential rulings in modern criminal justice history, upholding Georgia's revised capital punishment statute and effectively lifting the de facto moratorium on executions that had gripped the country for four years. The 7-to-2 decision in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, settled — for a generation at least — the question of whether the death penalty itself violated the Constitution.
The case arose from the conviction of Troy Leon Gregg, who had been found guilty in Georgia on two counts of murder and one count of armed robbery. After a separate sentencing phase, the trial jury imposed the death penalty on the murder convictions. Georgia's Supreme Court, conducting the mandatory review required by the state's revised statute, affirmed the death sentences for murder but vacated the death sentence for robbery alone, concluding it was disproportionate under state law. Gregg challenged what remained, arguing to the Supreme Court that imposing death for murder violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
To understand what the Court was deciding, you have to go back to 1972 and Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, where a divided 5-to-4 majority had effectively invalidated every capital punishment statute in the country. Furman did not declare the death penalty unconstitutional in all circumstances; it held that the manner in which death sentences were being imposed — left entirely to the unfettered discretion of individual juries, with no guiding standards — amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Potter Stewart's concurrence captured the problem in terms that would be quoted for decades: the existing statutes permitted "the wanton and the freakish" imposition of death sentences (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 310 (1972) (Stewart, J., concurring)), leaving those who received the death penalty as victims of what Stewart described as a system of organized randomness. Death rows across the country froze overnight.