Gregg v. Georgia Case: Summary and Significance of the 1976 Ruling

In late November of 1973, twenty-five-year-old Troy Leon Gregg was hitchhiking north in Florida with Floyd "Sam" Allen, age sixteen. The two were picked up by Fred Simmons and Bob Moore, who agreed to give them a ride into Georgia. They had just $8 to make the journey. A third hitchhiker, Dennis Weaver, was picked up en route and dropped off in Atlanta at the interchange of I-85 and Georgia Highway 23. Before the trip ended in Asheville, North Carolina, their hosts would be dead and robbed of the car and the cash in their pockets. They lay in the drainage ditch where Gregg shot them until police discovered their bodies. Two days later, Dennis Weaver noticed a newspaper headline that led him to provide law enforcement with information resulting in Gregg's apprehension. In 1974, Gregg was convicted of robbery and murder, with Sam Allen testifying against him, and sentenced to death. His appeal was denied, a decision later upheld by the Georgia State Supreme Court and, on review, by the U.S. Supreme Court. The night before he was to die in the electric chair in July, 1980, Gregg escaped from prison with three other inmates. He soon died after getting into a fight at a North Carolina bar.

Gregg was sentenced to die in the electric chair but escaped from prison the night before his scheduled execution to die in a bar fight in July of 1980.

In 1972, the Supreme Court broke precedent in its 5-4 decision that the death penalty, as applied, was unconstitutional. In its review, the Court looked at three Georgia and Texas cases. All defendants were black. Two had been convicted of rape. The other, Furman, was convicted of murder after his gun went off as he was fleeing the home he had burglarized, killing the resident. Under Georgia state law, because the gun was fired during the commission of a felony, the death penalty was appropriate, a sentence upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court.

A case brief organizes a judicial opinion into several meaningful components: facts of the case, legal issues involved, court holding, and rationale (the Court's explanation for its decision). In the Gregg v. Georgia case brief, the facts of the case indicate that Troy Leon Gregg was convicted of robbery and murder and sentenced to death. On appeal, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the death sentence except as it applied to robbery. At issue was the question of whether the death penalty is disallowed by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments as cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court held by a vote of 7-2 that the death sentence is appropriate in some cases as long as its administration is procedurally sound. The justices upheld Gregg's sentence using the rationale that Georgia's revised death penalty statute specifies a bifurcated process that separates conviction and sentencing, along with consideration of case-specific mitigating or aggravating factors and is thus Constitutionally sound.

In November of 1974, Troy Leon Gregg committed armed robbery and murder, shooting Fred Edward Simmons and Bob Durwood Moore, who had picked up Gregg and a hitchhiking companion along the Florida Interstate en route to Georgia. The key witness against Gregg, Dennis Weaver, a third passenger in the car, contacted law enforcement upon learning that the bodies of Simmons and Moore had been discovered in a drainage ditch near a busy Atlanta highway. He provided information that Gregg had shared with him about his eventual destination. With this tip, Gregg was apprehended in Asheville, North Carolina three days later. He was convicted by a Georgia jury on November 24, 1974. Gregg appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court, citing the Furman decision. He claimed that the administration of the death penalty in his case was cruel and unusual punishment. The Court heard oral arguments on March 31, 1976, and issued its ruling three months later, on July 2. The justices decided in favor of Georgia and Gregg lost his appeal.

The 1972 Furman decision brought a moratorium on states' imposition of the death penalty. Subsequently, Georgia revised its penal code in 1973 to include two phases: conviction and sentencing. In the latter phase, aggravating factors (grievous conditions) had to be considered before capital punishment could be imposed. While the Georgia Supreme Court disallowed capital punishment for the armed robbery, it upheld Gregg's death sentence for the murders, appropriately applied, referencing the updated statute in its Gregg v. Georgia ruling.

At the time, 66% of Americans supported capital punishment in murder cases. Justice Potter Stewart's 1972 prediction that the Furman decision would "finish" the death penalty nationwide had been proven wrong. Rather, 35 states, including Georgia, passed rewritten death penalty statutes. In seven states, the death penalty was mandatory in capital cases. Others, like Georgia, adopted two-stage trials that separated conviction and sentencing and required appellate court affirmation before the administration of the death penalty.

Gregg v. Georgia Ruling

Arguing for the State of Georgia was Solicitor General Robert Bork, pitted against Anthony Amsterdam, counsel for Troy Gregg, who had helped to guide the NAACP's trial strategy in the Furman case. Nearly three months after oral arguments were completed, on July 2, 1976, the Supreme Court issued a 7-2 ruling that the death penalty as applied in Gregg's case violated neither the eighth nor the fourteenth Amendments. Gregg's appeal was denied, affirming state statutes.

The Supreme Court's decision in Gregg v. Georgia resurrected the constitutional viability of states' death penalty laws. The moratorium that had been in place since 1972 was lifted. Precedent had been set. States could retain statutes defining procedures for convicting and sentencing defendants in capital crimes, with added confidence that these laws would pass appellate review. This landmark decision, then, while overturning the practice of standardless, "arbitrary and capricious" death penalty sentences, affirmed capital punishment as an appropriate penalty approved by most Americans. Today, the death penalty remains part of the penal code in twenty-seven states. In most of these, lethal injection is the usual means of execution, with electrocution used primarily in South Carolina alone.

Hitchhiker Troy Leon Gregg's murder of two men in Georgia in November 1974 resurrected support for the death penalty nationwide. Gregg's conviction and sentencing by a Georgia jury, upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court, would result in the landmark case that tested state death penalty laws revised after the Furman decision in 1972. Gregg's appeal challenged Georgia's 1973 capital punishment statute and his sentencing as violations of the eighth and fourteenth amendments' protections against cruel and unusual punishment, as cited in Furman v. Georgia.