The United States should Abolish the Death Penalty

"A. You made a claim the death penalty works to deter crime using a quote, but didn't cite a source so we could review the study, therefore we can disregard that, since you did not give us a chance to check its validity."I did, dude. I wrote the philosopher's name, and even the theory's name. One simple google search would've gotten the answer. It's as if you aren't reading any of this. "A. I have no clue what you really mean there, but you were making a point that having the death penalty increases the rate at which violent criminals are found and arrested which is completely asinine itself and then gave no evidence for this."What? Now you're just taking and putting words into my mouth. For God's sake, the arrested statistics is to show the power of deterrent; how people are really deters. If the act of arresting already deters people, what more would the death sentence be?"Well your source is 46 pages long, I won't bother. However, I think my evidence that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent is enough."That's great. Oh, your whole rebuttal is around 10,000 characters long, so I'll just disregard the whole thing, and put mine on the pedestal. I summarized it for you; you asked for the source. I give you the source, you disregarded it. And proceed to also disregard my whole previous examples and arguments. Voters, please do not read Pro's arguments and rebuttals blindly. As I have shown in a lot of my rebuttals, Pro doesn't read and simply accuse my points as "inaccurate" or "sourceless" even though it is all there. Pro has also taken a lot of my words out of context. This is not a personal attack on Pro; I'm just making a simple observance, and would like to give the voters a discretion."A. I did give you evidence, I gave you a graph (or a link to it) that shows states with the death penalty actually have higher murder rates every year for the last 25 years, so clearly it has not been very effective as a deterrent, but I could give you more"I'm talking about evidence that death sentence did not play a part in the states that legalized it. "The study found that when asked if they believe the death penalty is a deterrent, 88% of them said no, while only 5% said yes, with 7% being indifferent. "If they "believe". Which is just a, to quote from my adversary, ""A. Okay, but this is a bare assertion right now."". I've presented statistics, and even evidence, but you come up with a survey? A survey with opinions?" But it gets worse, when asked if they thought there was good empirical evidence to support it is a deterrent... 94% said no, so even many criminologists who believe the death penalty works as a deterrent agree there is not much evidence to support that claim."First off, still opinion based. I've shown you statistics. Instead of presenting opinions, maybe read through my examples and tell me how deterrent fails. I've shown you how the Theory of "rational Thinking" works. You failed to rebut how police deterred according to the danger. Your source refers to criminologists, who do not have the econometric background to understand the modern research; if you did a survey of economists there would be a different result. A question asks if the DP deters any amount. 100% of those surveyed said yes. Link: http://tinyurl.com..."However, since execution has stopped, state murder rates have declined. If cons argument was true then murder rates would have went up. ""No but come on man, if that was true, states with the death penalty would have decreased in homicide rates, while states without it would have remained stagnant. ""But pal if what your saying had any validity, then since the death penalty deters crime better than life sentences, than those states would have dropped faster"Cool way of linking two of my arguments. Like I said, DP is not the best source of deterrent, and neither is it the only deterrent, as implied by Pro. DP isn't the best, but it is an effective method of deterrent. Correlation is always difficult to prove but any reader will see that the strongest evidence in this debate proves a deterrent effect. Even if 1% of crimes are deterrable there are more lives saved than the highest possible number for innocents executed. I provided many reasons why the number may be as high as 5% or more. Of course police are important, but they are part of certainty. Deterrence also includes severity of punishment which the DP emphasises and thus has a large effect. Here are more statistics and data to play with.Two studies by Paul Simmerman found deterrent effects. The first paper, (http://ageconsearch.umn.edu...) uses data from 1978-1997. In the second paper (http://papers.ssrn.com...), he extends the dataset to 2000. In the papers, he found that each execution deters 14 murders."A. Me making that point was mostly me just saying that if it is for retribution but sometimes innocent people get killed it is clearly counter productive. If you are trying to say that innocent people getting killed with the death penalty, then it's wrong, I gave evidence for that."Look, dude. I was describing retribution as one of the purpose of punishment. Never did I say that "These goals are goals that DP is trying to accomplish). Please do read once again before rebutting next time. "A. Here they pretend like I gave no evidence that the death penalty costs more, which is 100% inaccurate. But I will do it again."Let the voter come in and check his previous arguments, whether he has stated anything with strong proof and evidence, or even numbers. He made a claim that he has given evidence. Let the voters reread his previous arguments to view his credibility. As for all money and cost concern, I will rebut it in a section later on. "So what my opponent says at the end is fundamentally flawed, as his evidence is simply when the death penalty started murder rates decreased in those states"I already explained this above. Let's start with the points!1. CostUsing the methods cost studies use, the DP costs 2.5 times more than LWOP. But in jurisdictions where the DP is much more common, the DP only costs 1.4-1.5 times as much ( http://www.cjlf.org...) This is because of plea bargains. These often avoid the cost of the trial entirely, so cases where there is no cost balance out the cases where trial costs are extremely high due to capital trials. Opponents of the death penalty argue that carrying out a sentence of life without parole costs less. They overlook the counter-balancing savings of having the death penalty as a bargaining chip by which a guilt plea is obtained in return for taking the death penalty off the table. If the defendant pleads guilty, the cost of a trial and expensive appeals are avoided. Moreover, a serial killer may disclose his other victims in return for life-without-parole. Prosecutors will only accept claims verified by the locations of the bodies. Closing those cases reduces the cost of investigation and provides closure to the families of the victims. Without the death penalty, the only bargaining is reducing life-without-parole to a sentence that allows the possibility of release.The main reason that it costs so much to prosecute death penalty cases is that judges opposed to the death penalty allow trivial or even ridiculous legal arguments to be used as an excuse to delay carrying out the sentence. Some judges go so far as to violate the law in supporting appeals. Judge Kozinsky explained this in his book. A method to solve this is to make judicial oath stricter, and to provide an independent panel to censure judges who pursue politics on the bench. The ultimate solution is impeachment by the legislature to restore legislativ power to the proper branch of government. A remedy is to tighten the judicial oath and to provide an independent panel to censure judges who pursue politics on the bench. The ultimate remedy is impeachment by the legislature to restore legislative power to the proper branch of government. Some lengthy appeals are generated when the initial counsel did not provide an adequate defense. This happens when a rural locality cannot afford expensive outside counsel to defend the accused. State governments should bear the costs; those costs will be saved later by a shortened appeals process. Finally, all appeals based upon legal process should be required to be filed within two years of the initial conviction. That would prevent judges from granting delays based upon appeals filed in sequence.Furthermore, the death penalty will cut down long term costs. The extra cost of having a death penalty is computed according to death penalty cost = cost of a capital trial and appeals + extra incarceration cost during trial – cost of a non-capital trial and appeals – savings due to plea bargaining – savings due to shorter incarceration Using the Federal average cost of incarceration: death penalty cost = $2.0 million + 15 * $29K – 0.2 *$2 million – 35 * $29K= $1050K Trial costs will always be more because of extra scrutiny, but states without local obstruction show the extra trial costs can be reduced to $1 million. Virginia has demonstrated an average time from conviction to execution of six years with all the present safeguards. The data from a study of urban areas across the county indicates that plea bargaining can offset the extra prosecution costs if a capital case costs less than 2.4 times a non-capital case, and in two states the ratio is about 1.6. Finally, it's unreasonable to suppose that the cost of incarceration will not rise over a period of fifty years. Using a modest assumption, total costs more than double. The cost is then $1 million + 6*$29K – (2.4 /1.6)*$1 million – 44*$29K*2 = - $2.9 million I have further proof of this in the comment section, if you're interested. If not, this is all I have to say. Death Penalty is just a little more than Jail time, as opposed to how my opponent portrays it.