The US should abolish capital punishment

Most people would agree that brutal murder is unjust. Imagine looking upon the corpse of your loved one; the rage, the sadness, the depression it brings makes it utterly immoral. You question the justice of the murderer’s actions. How is it fair and moral to bring on depression? To destroy all empathy within you? In the criminal justice system, one values justice. And justice is decided on utilitarian grounds. That’s because justice inherently is about whether an action is desirable or not. It seeks to ensure a moral ground. In fact, justice -- by definition -- is fairness and morality in decision making. Therefore, what justice results in is what is desirable. The murder isn’t desirable, and that’s exactly why it is unjust. What is not desirable to a large population is unjust. My argument is simple: the death penalty’s abolition would be unjust, because it would destroy utilitarianism and tends to minimize utility. St. Augustine said, “An unjust law is no law at all.” Seeing as I agree with him, I negate. Government policy ought to be decided on the basis of utilitarian cost/benefit analysis. The purpose of government is the prevention of harm to its citizens. The government often can infringe upon individual liberty, and people often disagree with government policies. Then, on what basis can people accept the legitimacy of a government? The answer lies in John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” which theorizes that the fundamental purpose of government is the reduction or prevention of harm to its citizens. Nobody has any right to infringe on what a person chooses to do, unless the aim is to prevent greater harm. Government legitimacy is lost, and anarchy is justified, if a government fails to follow the harm principle. Therefore, the grounds for deciding this debate should be on the basis of cost/benefit analysis. If Pro proves that the death penalty causes greater harm than benefit, vote Pro. If I show that capital punishment causes greater benefit than harm, vote Con. What is my advocacy? Retain the death penalty. My advocacy is to retain capital punishment in the United States. As Kennedy v. Louisiana established, that means the application of the death penalty to those convicted of first-degree homicide or worse crimes only, with the sentence decided by a court of law. My advocacy differs only in one bit to the status quo, in that the application of the death penalty is only by means of nitrogen asphyxiation, and that the US shall not execute extradited criminals, to ensure that countries in places like the EU do extradite criminals to the US. Now let’s see why the death penalty is just, and shouldn’t be abolished, under utilitarian grounds.(1)Rational action theory, an economic theory, suggests that all mentally stable humans perform a cost/benefit analysis prior to committing any action. Recently, economists have extended the same theory to criminology, and the results have been startling -- they’ve found that the death penalty has a significant effect on homicide reduction. It deters homicides. Among the most reliable of the studies in the economic literature relating to capital punishment’s deterrence of homicides is one by Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Paul H. Rubin. It uses state-level data to prove that a single execution in the United States, on balance, deters 18 homicides. The study has hardly been contested, and remains a reliable and strong one. In fact, multiple other studies have backed the data found by Dezhbakhsh and Rubin, so much so that the numbers are stunningly close. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but there is quite a major causation link to suggest deterrence. The study is linked below. http://www.tandfonline.com... Another strong empirical study that I like is a case study of the death penalty by Naci Mocan and Kaj Gittings to illustrate the impact of incentives on human behavior (Naci Mocan and Kaj Gittings, “The Impact of Incentives on Human Behavior: Can We Make It Disappear?”, The Economics of Crime, p. 379 - 418, edited by Rafael Di Tella, Sebastian Edwards, and Ernesto Schargrodsky, University of Chicago Press, July 2010). They found a lot of empirical data in the states of the United States to demonstrate that the death penalty causes a significant drop in homicide rates. According to the study, when New York State, New Hampshire and Kansas adopted the death penalty, there was a significant crime drop. When New Jersey and Massachusetts abolished capital punishment, the homicide rate rose. Specifically, the study also provided a refutation of the claim made by Donohue and Wolfers that when New Hampshire and Kansas legalized the death penalty, the crime rate rose. The study is another reason to believe that the death penalty deters crime. http://www.nber.org... In the 1990’s, the United States experienced a major drop in crime. After predictions by various economists that crime would constantly rise, there was a sudden standstill in homicide and crime rates. According to economist John R. Lott, capital punishment was responsible for 12 - 14% of the crime drop in the 1990’s (John R. Lott, Freedomnomics, p. 135, Regnery Publishing, June 2007). He also supports a number of 15 murders deterred per execution. FCC economist Paul Zimmerman calculates about 14 murders deterred per execution. (2)There have been many instances in the American justice system when criminals have reoffended. A study from the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed that of prisoners released in 1994, 1.2% of those convicted of homicide were arrested for another homicide within three years of release. In 2009, 8.6% of those on death row had a prior homicide conviction, and over 5% of those on death row committed their capital crime while in custody or during an escape. http://www.bjs.gov... According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, recidivism rates for homicides are actually fairly high, despite journalistic claims to the contrary. 12.5% of those whose greatest offense was homicide were arrested in 6 months, and, over 5 years, 51.2% had been arrested again. Of those whose only offense was homicide, the rate was 0.9%. http://www.bjs.gov... So the worst criminals have extremely high recidivism rates, of up to 51.2%, while those who only murder have a recidivism rate of 0.9%. While the latter number may seem small, it is fairly significant because of the number of murders. Therefore, the death penalty saves more lives sheerly due to preventing recidivism. --I’ll now rebut Pro’s points:(1) Pro seeks to first interpret the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. But it’s not up to Pro to interpret either. The Supreme Court is the body charged with the interpretation of the Constitution. What the Supreme Court says the Constitution says is what the Constitution says. While the Supreme Court may not be inherently infallible, we must treat it as such. As Justice Jackson remarked, the Supreme Court is not final because it is infallible, it is infallible because it is final. The final interpreter of the Constitution cannot be challenged in its duty, for the sake of order. It’s not up to Pro to interpret the Constitution. Furthermore, the right to life is not absolute. In case of war, the government can cause mandatory conscription. Abortion is legal in the United States as well. (2) There’s no weighing mechanism to analyze cost. Lives outweigh costs, since the government’s legislation is to prevent harm to others. There’s no impact to the costs arguments. Furthermore, the cost of one murder to society is $17 million. Based on Lott’s calculation of deterrence, this means the death penalty saves a lot more money than it uses. http://www.slate.com... (3) Racism exists in the criminal justice system, regardless of what the punishment is. Application of life without parole and other forms of imprisonment would also be racist. Abolishing the death penalty won’t prevent racism. Unless Pro advocates abolishing all punishment in the United States, racism isn’t going to be solved by the plan. Don’t abolish the death penalty just because of racism, since the death penalty will deter crime anyway. Racism doesn’t cause innocent death -- abolition does. (4) High exonerations allows for the prevention of innocent death. There are, as Pro observes, large amounts of DP exonerations, which reduces the possibility of innocent death. Current data suggests that the rightful conviction rate for the DP is actually 99.72%. And this is excluding exonerations. The actual number of innocents executed would be very less. This is completely offset by the deterrent effect of capital punishment--the death penalty, on average, saves more innocent lives than it takes. As such, the DP saves more lives, so this argument can be discredited under impact calculus.I’ve proven that the government should legislate on the basis of utilitarianism, and, therefore, it is utilitarian calculations that decide what the government should do. I’ve proven that the death penalty saves lives, and upholds utilitarianism. Therefore, it is unjust to abolish the death penalty.