Gregg v. Georgia, Proffitt v. Florida, Jurek v. Texas, Woodson v. North Carolina, and Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. It reaffirmed the Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States, upholding, in particular, the death sentence imposed on Troy Leon Gregg. The case is referred to by a leading scholar as the July 2 Cases, and elsewhere referred to by the lead case Gregg. The court set forth the two main features that capital sentencing procedures must employ in order to comply with the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishments". The decision essentially ended the de facto moratorium on the death penalty imposed by the Court in its 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia . Background Cases All five cases share the same basic procedural history. After the Furman decision, the states of Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Louisiana amended their death penalty statutes to meet the Furman guidelines. Subsequently, the five named defendants were convicted of murder and sentenced to death in their respective states. The respective state supreme courts upheld the death sentence. The defendants then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review their death sentence, asking the Court to go beyond Furman and declare once and for all the death penalty to be "cruel and unusual punishment" and thus in violation of the Constitution; the Court agreed to hear the cases. In the July 2 Cases, the Court's goal was to provide guidance to states in the wake of Furman. In Furman only one basic idea could command a majority vote of the Justices: capital punishment, as then practiced in the United States, was cruel and unusual punishment because there were no rational standards that determined when it was imposed and when it was not. The question the Court resolved in these cases was not whether the death sentence imposed on each of the individual defendants was cruel, but rather whether the process by which those sentences were imposed was rational and objectively reviewable. Capital punishment and the Eighth Amendment The defendants in each of the five cases urged the Court to go further than it had in Furman by holding once and for all that capital punishment was cruel and unusual punishment that violated the Eighth Amendment. However the Court responded that "The most marked indication of