The Court was determined to simultaneously save capital punishment in the United States and impose some reasoned basis for carrying it out. That reasoning flows from the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause. Although capital punishment, per se, was not found by the Court to be cruel and unusual, it must still be carried out in a manner consistent with the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. In the Court's view, the country's history with capital punishment suggests that those evolving standards of decency could not tolerate a return to the mandatory death penalty for murder that had prevailed in medieval England.