The Death Penalty is a just punishment in certain cases.

In his negation, my opponent has stated that the offender must be kept alive so that he can repay damages done to the person offended. It would be quite interesting to see this actually happen. The criminals are generally not allowed to work due to the strong risk that they will escape and even in the few places where they do work, the money they earn hardly ever goes to the cause of the person he offended and even if it did, it would hardly cover the costs that my opponent has referenced. Moreover, my opponent has explicitly stated that "it is preferable to deprive the offender of their rights until just amends have been made. " One of these rights could very easily be the right to life, which therefore refutes and makes useless his entire negation. Using my opponents definition of just, let us again look at the debate topic: "The death penalty is a just punishment in certain cases. " "Just," according to my opponent, refers to reason and truth and justice. Therefore, he states that the death penalty is not reasonable or truly necessary in all cases. However, I disagree. Justice has always been a system of equal retribution, in other words, it means that one must pay equal to the actions he has committed. In his argument, he has stated that slavery would be a more just punishment than death in all cases. However, if the crime was murder, my opponent has already conceited that it is impossible to repay damages done. Meaning that it is impossible to create equal retribution. However, with the death penalty for murder crimes, just as the offender took another's right to life, his right to life is taken from him. The death penalty therefore enforces equal retribution in certain circumstances and therefore proves the PRO side of this argument to be undeniably correct. Furthermore, my opponent has requested proof on the justice of the Death Penalty and so here they are: 1. "In 1985, 13-year-old Karen Patterson was shot to death in her bed in North Charleston, S. C. Her killer was a neighbor who had already served 10 years of a life sentence for murdering his half-brother Charles in 1970. " . http://www.prodeathpenalty.com... In this story, had the murder been killed on his first offence, the second victim would still be alive. Through "reason", it can be seen that the death penalty indeed would have been just for this occasion. 2. "When Katy Davis observed three strangers outside her Austin, Texas, apartment, she walked away. Returning later, she was attacked and forced to open the door by Charles Rector, on parole for a previous murder. The men ransacked her apartment, abducted her and took her to a lake where she was beaten, gang-raped, shot in the head and repeatedly forced underwater until she drowned. " . http://www.prodeathpenalty.com... Another case in which if the murder had been executed, another's life would have been saved. 3. Ruby Longsworth of Pasadena, Texas, met Jeffrey Barney through a prison ministry, then helped him get paroled from an auto-theft sentence. Her kindness was repaid when Barney raped and sodomized her, then strangled her with a cord. She had made the mistake of calling Barney "a bum" after she had gotten to know him better. . http://www.prodeathpenalty.com... Yet another case where the death penalty would have been a just retribution. These three cases irrefutable show that the death penalty is beneficial and just (reasonable) in "certain cases" and can therefore prove my side of the argument. I will end my argument by the following quote: "If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call. " John McAdams - Marquette University/Department of Political Science, on deterrence Thanks