The United States should Abolish the Death Penalty

"He states that criminals are rational. They, like us law abiding citizens, respond to costs and benefits. If something is more expensive, people would tend to use less of the product because the benefits are severely less. Similarly, crime works the same way. If the severity and certainty of a punishment increases, crime will naturally, decrease." A. Okay, but this is a bare assertion right now. "...we can see that when arrests on violent crime increase juvenile crimes across the board decreases." A. Okay, however arrests on violent crime are different from the death penalty. Having the death penalty or not does not mean violent criminals are arrested more. "For every death row sentence, 4.5 murders are deterred. Each execution deterred 3 murders, and one murder is deterred for every 2.75 years reduction spent on death row. These results stands even after robustness checks, and she takes into account other variables." A. Problem with this, con doesn't have a source that we can examine so we can ignore this until next round when they present a source. (graph) A. Murder rates did decrease, but it is not because of the death penalty. Murder rates have been decreasing in both states with and without the death penalty since the 1980's. What we can conclude from this is that the we can not give the decrease in murder rates to the death penalty. B. A graph on the website for the death penalty shows that at least since 1990, states with no death penalty have had lower murder rates. In 1990, states without the death penalty averaged at a murder rate of 9.16, while states with the death penalty at a 9.50. The trend has continued since then, as in 2014 states without the death penalty averaged at a rate of 3.70, while states with the death penalty averaged with 4.75. As you can see, the rates both ways have consistently decreased, while states without the death penalty always have higher murder rates, so we can not contribute the decreasing murder rates to the death penalty, but other factors. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... "deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation." A. 1 deterrent doesn't work. retribution does not justify the lives of innocent people." "Fix the person. TO many people, including Edward fester, the most important goal of a punishment is retribution." A. But if innocent people are dying, that goes out the window, and as I showed, sometimes they do. Giving them a life sentence isn't to correct them, but to contain them, because if they are proven innocent which has happened multiple times before, you can't justify killing them. "A little girl, the age of 9 is murdered by her father. Not only was she murdered, she had signs of being being, starved, whipped, and even had evidence that her father raped her." A. But imagine this scenario, they execute the father. 5 years later, new evidence turns up, they have enough evidence now to definitively say, the father did not murder her. Is it really justice now? This happens 4.1% of the time. Why take the chance of killing innocents, it removed the purpose? Listen, for some one guilty I don't feel a moral obligation to keep them alive, however when there is a chance they are innocent, and the death penalty costs up to 5 times more, is it really worth it?