The US should abolish the death penalty

Thank you, Con! As expected, you have provided a strong case. Rebuttal: Deterrence First off, Con is relying on an appeal to authority. Economists are not the experts in criminology - criminologists are. That being said, Con has not delivered anything with weight to refute my deterrence from round 1.What is the consensus of criminologists? Professor Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock concluded 88% of criminologists do not believe the death penalty is an effective deterrent to crime. "There is overwhelming consensus among America’s top criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question fails to support the threat or use of the death penalty." [12] Even if Con had a valid authority, there is a flaw with the Rational choice theory (RCT) in that criminals do not always make rational choices. For instance, “Bounded rationality” describes an individual’s rationality being limited by any number of things including time, information they have, or their ability to understand the situation. Certainly, there may be a desire for a rational solution but individuals often find themselves unable to achieve it due to these obstacles.Finally, if the death penalty truly provides deterrence, then we can make a prediction: States with the death penalty should have a lower homicide rate than states without. This is objectively false. [14]Capital Punishment is not a deterrent. It appears, if anything, it is more closely related to the opposite. Recidivism Recidivism: a tendency to relapse into a previous condition or mode of behavior; especially : relapse into criminal behavior Con argues the Death penalty prevents recidivism. It seems a rather bizarre point to suggest that killing someone stops them from doing bad things. Of course it does – it stops them from ever doing anything again. The problem with this argument is that it assumes the criminal has been rehabilitated or that he or she will have the opportunity to relapse after the punishment has been administered, and that is completely absurd. Putting a criminal in a cage is not attempting to rehabilitate, and death is not a punishment from which someone can relapse. Even by Con’s skewed definition of recidivism, anything short of instantaneous death could not guarantee repetition of the same activity for which the criminal was imprisoned to begin with. Capital punishment takes, on average, 15 years. Con acknowledges this time frame. Capital punishment does not prevent recidivism in reality or by Con’s understanding of it. That being said, the U.S. has one of the worst recidivism rates in the world – more than 76% [7]. More than three-quarters of all persons in prison, when released, will be re-arrested. Our system is broken, and we need to consider alternatives. As it is, we are focused on retribution rather than rehabilitation, revenge over rationality. Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world: 20% - and they have no capital punishment or life imprisonment. Low recidivism rates can be achieved without Capital punishment. Kill the Death Penalty. Death Penalty is just? DP can only be just if it is applied consistently across all races, regardless of the race of the victim, and across all income levels. A study of Washington juries showed discrimination against black defendants. “...jurors in Washington are three times more likely to recommend a death sentence for a black defendant than for a white defendant in a similar case. The study examined 285 cases in which defendants were convicted of aggravated murder. The cases were analyzed for factors that might influence sentencing, including the number of victims, the prior criminal record of the defendant, and the number of aggravating factors alleged by the prosecutor. “ [9] The problem is not limited to Washington. In Louisiana, if the victim white, then a death sentence is much more probable than if the victim is black. “Even after considering other variables such as the number of aggravating circumstances, the number of concurrent felonies and the number of homicide victims, the odds of a death sentence were 97% higher for those whose victim was white than for those whose victim was black.” [10] Lastly, the poor are affected negatively by Capital punishment. “Poor people are also far more likely to be death sentenced than those who can afford the high costs of private investigators, psychiatrists, and expert criminal lawyers.” [11] U.S. Supreme Court Justice said in 1994,”Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, and, despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake." [12] When you consider all this and the fact that DP can, and does, kill innocents, it is most definitely not a just punishment. Back to you, Con. [7] http://www.nij.gov... [8] http://www.salve.edu... [9] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... [10] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... [11] https://www.aclu.org... [12] http://www.amnestyusa.org...[13] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...[14] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...