<P> The Furman decision caused all death sentences pending at the time to be reduced to life imprisonment, and it was described by scholars as a "legal bombshell ." The next day, columnist Barry Schweid wrote that it was "unlikely" that the death penalty could exist anymore in the United States . </P> <P> The Court's decision forced states and the U.S. Congress to rethink their statutes for capital offenses to ensure that the death penalty would not be administered in a capricious or discriminatory manner . </P> <P> 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 . </P>

The supreme court's ruling in furman v. georgia revolved around