The Death Penalty is Just

My opponent seems to have made this mistake of arguing for the wrong side. I will allow him to change his argument in the next round if he so chooses, and will procceed with my case now and respond to my opponent's case in the next round.COSTS:The costs of the death penalty are exorbitantly higher than non-capital punishments. On average, capital cases cost local governments $2 million more than their non-capital brothers (1). This is due to more pre-trial motions, more investigation required by the defense team, more time required to select and exclude jury members, more days spent in court, more lawyers required by statute, and longer and more complicated appeals.And this is something that local governments cannot afford. The GAO reports that state and local governments would need to cut their spending by 14.2% to avoid bankruptcy (2). The Death Penalty has such a significant effect on local governments that in 2009, eleven state legislatures considered abolishing the death penalty for associated costs (1). This lack of funds due to having the death penalty trades off with other things we can be spending money on (i.e. police forces, education, medical care. transportation infrastructure, etc.). It's so bad that local governments are actually diverting funds from these areas just to be able to afford capital trials (1). This has two major impacts:One, the fact that we're diverting funds away from the police to pay for the death penalty cripples our ability to prevent crime. Studies have shown that each additional police officer that a city employs prevents, on average, 24 serious crimes a year (3). This means that a) the death penalty prevents us from being able to prevent crime. This both disproves arguments from deterrence, since the more we spend on the death penalty the fewer crimes we're able to stop, and outweighs arguments from deterrence because proactively preventing crimes from occuring will always be better for society than retroactively punishing those who commit crimes. Two, diverting funds from our education system to pay for the death penalty is crippling our economy. A study has found that our education system is costing the United State's economy $2.3 billion (from producing underperforming workers) (4). This is devastating since the worse the economy is, the more likely crime is to spawn from things like poverty (5), which a) further disproves arguments from deterrence, and b) outweighs since if we stop spending so much on the death penalty we can start spending more to give people the tools they need not to commit crimes, which proactively prevents crime. PREVENTS EXTRADITIONThe United States having the death penalty is causing the EU and other countries to adopt policies that disallow extradition of criminals to the United States if it's believed they will be put to death for their crimes (they view it as a human right's violation) (6). This harms our counter-terrorism efforts because other countries won't extradite suspects of terrorism to us to be tried (7). If this refusal to extradite leads to a single terrorist attack, the impact of the attack would outweigh any possible claims of deterrence (even though 87% of criminologists agree that the death penalty doesn't have any kind of detterent effect) (8).MISTAKES CAN BE MADEHumanity is flawed and imperfect. We're capable of making mistakes, which could be catastrophic in the case of the death penalty. Unlike prison sentances or rehabilitation, which can be reversed upon the discovery of new evidence that proves innocence, the death penalty cannnot be counted back for. Once you're dead, you're dead. And this is relevant because there are a lot of people being exonerated from false convictions, more than two thousand to be exact (9). A study has shown that the false conviction rate is probably somewhere around 0.5% (10). This may seem small, but put in context it means that around eight thousand people in jail currently are actually innocent of their crimes (11). With that, I pass the floor over to my opponent and await his revised case! :) Good luck!Sources:(1) - Sherod Thaxton, “Leveraging Death,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 103, No. 2, 201 (2) - http://tinyurl.com...(3) - http://tinyurl.com...(4) - http://tinyurl.com...(5) - http://tinyurl.com...(6) - http://tinyurl.com...(7) - http://tinyurl.com...(8) - http://tinyurl.com...(9) - http://tinyurl.com...(10) - http://tinyurl.com...(11) - http://tinyurl.com...