the US should support the death penalty.

i repeat. (this debat thing is screwy and keeps sending me outdated emails that i need to update.) the Bill of Rights, inspired by John Locke, has given all people of the United states the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The key aspect here is that everyone has been given the right to life. Everyone deserves to live." the right to life is definitely in dispute. As i adressed in my case, there is a social contract which provides for a reciprical relationship between the citizens and the government. while the governments holds the obligation to provide life, liberty, and the right to property, and the bill of rights even defends this, the constitution does not protect these rights if the person breaks the social contract. in this case the person would commit murder and thus break the social contract. thus, the governemnt, upon convictions, is no longer obligated to adhear to that person's rights. so for this reason they do not have the right to life anymore. Since, after all, why should the government be obligated to a person's rights if they are interfering with the rights of another and so blatantly disregard them? "People have been acquitted after their deaths due to their innocence in the case that they died because of. Innocent people can be considered guilty when they really are not due to problems with DNA testing or other evidence and even because of slanted juries. Neither of these a excusable reason for the death of an innocent human being who was tortured with the prospect of their unnecessary death in the last period of their life." my opponent is likely referring to this list. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...... However, the very problem with the use of this argument is that this is an issue with the justice system, not the death penalty. The justice system requires that the jury convict "without a shadow of a doubt" and considering there is already a deterence for juries to agree to the death penalty, it is not as if the justice system weilds capital punishment lightly. I'd also like to bring into question the list itself. If you view the list, few enough people were acquitted due to DNA evidence. furthermore, the proportionality does not make sense. It would be no worse for a person to die by the death penalty before proof of innocence appears than if a person died after life in prison and were acquitted after they died. "A New York Times study showed that over the last 20 years states with the death penalty had a 48% homicide rate compared to 23% in the states without the death penalty. Punishments for crime should also be made for the committer and not the rest of their family. The death penalty is so absolute that it affects the family members of the recipient by traumatizing them when they did nothing wrong but be related to the recipient." The point of hate crimes is not to provide a deterence in society, for who would be deterred if they are crazy enough to kill someone, but rather to provide for proportionality in the criminal law system. To rebut the note about hte families, first of all the family could also be traumatized that a member would commit murder. furthermore, is the victim not dead? is the victim's families and frends not traumatized? did they do anything wrong? no they did not. Furthermore, to use such a case would be appeal to pity in the court systems. the fact is that some crimes deserve death, and if we are to consider the family's feelings of the murderer, the just look at the family of the victim to see more devistation. Also, if to reaffirm my own points, there can be no reciprical relationship between the state and its individual populations when they are the ones who broke the social contract in the first place. Since they broke this social contract they apparently do not have any regard to that social contract.