The Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph *per curiam* order on June 29, 1972. The decision in *Furman v. Georgia* was 5-4. Each of the nine justices wrote a separate opinion, totaling 233 pages. The collective, fractured ruling held that the manner in which the death penalty was applied under current statutes constituted cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The effect was immediate and sweeping: it invalidated the death penalty laws of 39 states and the federal government. The sentences of 629 individuals on death row were commuted to life imprisonment.
The case centered on William Henry Furman, a Black man convicted of murder in Georgia during a burglary. His trial had lasted one day. The jury imposed death after hearing no evidence in mitigation. The Court's majority did not rule the death penalty inherently unconstitutional. Instead, the five justices in the majority found a constitutional flaw in its arbitrary and capricious application. Justice Potter Stewart's concurrence became famous: these death sentences were "cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual."
The decision created a four-year national moratorium on executions. It forced states to rewrite their laws to provide guided discretion, aiming to eliminate arbitrariness while retaining the penalty for certain aggravated crimes. This led to the bifurcated trial system, with a separate penalty phase, and the enumeration of aggravating and mitigating factors. New statutes were tested and upheld in 1976's *Gregg v. Georgia*, resuming executions under a new, more rigid framework.
*Furman*'s legacy is a paradox. It sought to rationalize and constrain the death penalty. In doing so, it catalyzed the modern, highly legalized capital punishment system, embedding it within a complex appellate process that often takes decades. The ruling attempted to cure arbitrariness, but subsequent studies continued to show disparities based on race of victim and geography, making *Furman* not an endpoint, but the start of a continuing constitutional debate.