Gregg v. Georgia
The Supreme Court upheld Georgia's rewritten death penalty law, ruling that capital punishment is not always unconstitutional and that Georgia's new procedures — splitting trials into guilt and sentencing phases, requiring juries to find specific aggravating factors, and mandating state supreme court review — adequately guarded against the arbitrary, freakish death sentences the Court had condemned four years earlier.
The decision effectively ended the nationwide moratorium on executions that followed the Court's 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia, giving states a blueprint for death penalty statutes that could survive constitutional review.
“We hold that the death penalty is not a form of punishment that may never be imposed, regardless of the circumstances of the offense, regardless of the character of the offender, and regardless of the procedure followed in reaching the decision to impose it.”
The plurality's central holding that capital punishment is not inherently unconstitutional.
How it got here: A Georgia jury convicted Gregg and sentenced him to death; the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed the murder sentences, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear his Eighth Amendment challenge.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Troy Gregg was convicted of murdering and robbing two men who had picked him up hitchhiking, based partly on his own admissions and a companion's account of the killings. A Georgia jury sentenced him to death after finding aggravating circumstances, under a capital-punishment law Georgia rewrote after the Supreme Court struck down its earlier death penalty system in 1972.
The question before the Court
Four years after the Court struck down death penalty laws as too arbitrary, could Georgia's rewritten capital sentencing system, with new safeguards, impose death without violating the Constitution?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that the death penalty does not automatically violate the Constitution, and that Georgia's rewritten capital sentencing law adequately fixed the arbitrariness problem identified four years earlier. The Court found that history, continued legislative support after 1972, and the legitimate goals of retribution and deterrence meant death is not inherently excessive punishment for murder.
Georgia's specific safeguards — a two-stage trial separating guilt from sentencing, a requirement that the jury find at least one specific aggravating factor beyond a reasonable doubt before it can even consider death, and automatic review by the state supreme court comparing the sentence to similar cases — sufficiently guided jury discretion. Because these procedures prevented the kind of freakish, arbitrary sentencing the Court had condemned in Furman v. Georgia, Gregg's death sentence for murder was upheld.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
This ruling reopened the door to executions across the United States after a four-year halt, and it gave the roughly three dozen states that had rewritten their capital laws confidence those statutes could stand. It shaped how every state death penalty law has been structured since, requiring juries to weigh specific aggravating factors and appellate courts to review each death sentence.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision, not a temporary order. Gregg's death sentence for murder was affirmed, though Georgia's high court had already vacated his robbery death sentences as disproportionate. The ruling, along with companion cases decided the same day, effectively ended the post-Furman execution moratorium and became the template state legislatures and courts have used ever since to draft and evaluate capital sentencing procedures.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether every possible death penalty procedure is constitutional — only that Georgia's specific system of guided jury discretion, aggravating-circumstance findings, and appellate proportionality review passed muster. Companion cases decided the same day addressed other states' different approaches, including mandatory death sentences, which the Court treated separately and less favorably.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice White
Justice White, joined by Chief Justice Burger and Justice Rehnquist, agreed Georgia's system was constitutional but focused more narrowly on rebutting the argument that prosecutorial discretion, jury mercy, and executive clemency would inevitably reproduce Furman's arbitrariness. He argued that as death becomes reserved for narrower, more serious categories of murder, juries will impose it consistently enough to satisfy the Constitution, and the state supreme court's proportionality review would catch any aberrant results.
Concurrence — Justice Blackmun
Justice Blackmun concurred in the judgment with only a citation back to his dissenting views in Furman v. Georgia, without separately explaining his reasoning in this case.
Dissent — Justice Brennan
“the punishment of death, for whatever crime and under all circumstances, is "cruel and unusual" in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution”Brennan's core objection that death is always unconstitutional, regardless of procedure.
Justice Brennan argued that the Eighth Amendment's evolving standards of decency require looking at the essence of the death penalty itself, not just the procedures used to impose it. He maintained his view from Furman that execution is inherently inconsistent with human dignity and therefore always unconstitutional, regardless of how carefully a state structures its sentencing procedure.
Dissent — Justice Marshall
Justice Marshall reaffirmed his Furman view that the death penalty is excessive and that an informed American public would reject it as morally unacceptable. He also disputed a new study relied on by the government suggesting the death penalty deters murder, arguing its methodology was deeply flawed, and rejected retribution as a legitimate justification for state killing under the Eighth Amendment.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first asked whether death is such an inherently excessive punishment that no procedure could ever make it constitutional, testing the punishment against the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, which the Court said must reflect society's 'evolving standards of decency.'
- Looking to history, the text of the Constitution itself (which assumes capital punishment exists), and the fact that most state legislatures had just rewritten death penalty laws after the Court's 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia, the Court concluded that a large share of society still regarded death as an acceptable punishment for murder.
- The Court then asked whether death serves any legitimate purpose, finding that retribution — society's structured response to serious wrongdoing, channeling the natural desire for vengeance into legal process — and deterrence of future crimes were both legitimate goals the death penalty could serve, even though the deterrent effect remained scientifically disputed.
- Having concluded the death penalty is not automatically unconstitutional, the Court turned to whether Georgia's specific procedures fixed the arbitrariness problem identified in Furman, where juries had unguided discretion to hand out death 'freakishly,' as rarely and unpredictably as being struck by lightning.
- The Court found that Georgia's bifurcated trial (a separate sentencing hearing after guilt is decided), the requirement that a jury find at least one specific statutory aggravating factor before it can even consider death, and automatic Georgia Supreme Court review comparing each death sentence to similar cases together channel jury discretion enough to prevent the wanton and freakish imposition condemned in Furman.
- Applying these standards to Gregg's case, the Court concluded that the jury's finding of aggravating circumstances and the state supreme court's proportionality review satisfied the Constitution, so his death sentence for murder could stand even though his death sentence for armed robbery had already been vacated by the state court as disproportionate.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Furman v. Georgia (408 U.S. 238)
The Court applied Furman's ban on arbitrary, freakish death sentencing while clarifying it does not outlaw capital punishment itself.
Limits McGautha v. California (402 U.S. 183)
The Court said McGautha survives only as a narrow due-process holding, since it is in tension with Furman's Eighth Amendment rule requiring standards to guide jury sentencing.