Resolved: The death penalty should be banned in the United States.

Contention 1: The death penalty is costly. Many people think that the death penalty is enforced to save money so that federal prisons do not have to keep criminals in their jail cells for their entire lifetimes. However this is not true. According to a report from the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice in 2008, it costs more for a criminal to be executed than to spend his/her entire life time in prison. The report states, "The additional cost of confining an inmate to death row, as compared to the maximum security prisons where those sentenced to life without possibility of parole ordinarily serve their sentences, is $90,000 per year per inmate. With California's current death row population of 670, that accounts for $63.3 million annually. The average cost of defending a trial in a federal death case is $620,932, about 8 times that of a federal murder case in which the death penalty is not sought." With only 30-50 executions per year, we can see that not a large number of people are qualified to actually be executed, therefore we should not be spending huge amounts of the government's money on a small percentage of criminals. Instead, the money could be going to regular prisons to improve the quality of life for criminals there. It is not logical for the U.S. to spend millions of dollars on a person as a punishment for their crime. Contention 2: Mistakes in death cases have lead to wrongful deaths Because the number of mistakes that prosecutors make when dealing with death cases, thousands of people have been put to death for no reason. Columbia University researchers tracked all capital convictions from 1973 to 1995, nearly 5,800 cases. They found serious errors in 68 percent. Two-thirds of death penalty cases that were appealed were successful, report researchers who contend the nation's capital punishment system is "collapsing under the weight of its own mistakes." It's not one case, it's thousands of cases. It's not one state, it's almost all of the states," says Columbia University law professor James Liebman, the lead author of the study. "You're creating a very high risk that some errors are going to get through the process." Because a human's life is one thing that cannot be brought back, it is crucial that the death penalty is abolished so that no more innocent lives are put to death because of a mistake. Contention 3: According to Jeffrey Fagan of Colombia University, the death penalty does not deter crime. He states, "These new studies [that claim a new evidence supports the conclusion that capital punishment has a positive deterrent effect] are fraught with technical and conceptual errors: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider all the relevant factors that drive murder rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, and the absence of any direct test of deterrence. These studies fail to reach the demanding standards of social science to make such strong claims, standards such as replication and basic comparisons with other scenarios. Some simple examples and contrasts, including a careful analysis of the experience in New York State compared to others, lead to a rejection of the idea that either death sentences or executions deter murder." Since the death penalty is mainly used as a warning to criminals not to murder or commit other crimes, it should be abolished since it is not deterring crime. For these reasons I can see nothing but an affirmative vote in today's debate.