the supreme court's ruling in furman v. georgia revolved around
Furman v. Georgia In the following four years, 37 states enacted new death penalty laws aimed at overcoming the court's concerns about arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Several statutes that mandated bifurcated trials, with separate guilt-innocence and sentencing phases, and imposing standards to guide the discretion of juries and judges in imposing capital sentences, were upheld in a series of Supreme Court decisions in 1976, led by Gregg v. Georgia. Other statutes enacted in response to Furman, such as Louisiana's which mandated imposition of the death penalty upon conviction of a certain crime, were struck down in cases of that same year.