The Death Penalty Should be Illegal

I thank my opponet for being so patient with me. I will now begin my arguments, but I will be responding in a different order than what my opponent brought this up. Contention 1: Detterance Now, we can all agree that Criminals are rational actors as we can see that they the plan and preform their crimes by weighing the costs and benefits. Economist do similiar type of cost-benefit analysist, so I would concider them to be a great expert on thie topic of studying such thing. They have found that there is a direct corrilation between the increasing penalties to that of decreasing crime. Teenagers, who we can all agree are less rational than adults, have been found to have their crime rates decrease when the penalty is stricter than not. (The Impact of Incentives on Human Behavior, Can we make it dissapear? The Case of the Death Penalty, by Nanci Mocan) This consensis has grown over time as economist Issac Ehrlich did research on this theory and was the first to do so and has found emperical evidense that the Death Penalty is a Detterance and found that the Death Penalty saves three lives on average. ( Ehrlich, Isaac. “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death,” The American Economic Review, Vol. 65, No. 3. (1975), pp. 397-417.) My opponent might just say, well that was from 1975, this is 2014, 2015 tomorrow making that piece of evidence 40 years old. It's invalid right? Wrong, newer evidence still confirms this theory as the Heritage Foundation found the following conclusion when researching this topic, "the recent studies using panel data techniques have confirmed what we learned decades ago: Capital punishment does, in fact, save lives. Each additional execution appears to deter between three and 18 murders. While opponents of capital punishment allege that it is unfairly used against African-Americans, each additional execution deters the murder of 1.5 African-Americans. Further moratoria, commuted sentences, and death row removals appear to increase the incidence of murder." (http://www.heritage.org...) My opponent's evidence is skewed as it doesn't account for the lagged efforts when creating their models while economists do. Death Penalty cases are done before and after the exicution, and it has been found that deterance is strong to begin with then slowly decreases. This means that a decreased time on death row would skyrocket the deterance rates. It used to be if you were on Death Row you would be exicuted within hours, now it's much, much longer than that. ( Shepherd, Joanna M. “Murders of Passion, Execution Delays, and the Deterrence of Capital Punishment,” Clemson University Working Paper, (2003). ) A Congressional Testimony from Paul Rubin has shown that evidence against the Death Penalty and like evidence, "has yet to be scientifically evaluated." and has argued that modern evidence “have exploited better data and more sophisticated statistical techniques”, the modern evidence has “consistently shown that capital punishment has a strong deterrent effect.” (Statistical Evidence on Capital Punishment and the Deterrence of Homicide by Paul Rubin) In another Congressional testimony Joann Shepard has found that per 1 exicuted criminal via the Death Penalty prevents 3-18 murders. (http://1.usa.gov... ) [use way back machine for it] Contention 2: Innocents Most people who are exicuted that are "innocent" aren't really innocent, but rather there is just some doubt to weather or not it's truely 100% their fault. Via today's DNA rate and technology they have found a 0.28% error rate in killing innocent people. Out of the 260,000 people convicted for murder in the US, they have found that 34 were wrongly convicted, of those 34 18 were exicuted. My friend mistakes will happen, but when we say the costs and benefits here we can see that saving more lives is more important and with our technology growing more and more advanced the error rate is decreasing. (http://www.nationalreview.com...) and (http://www.cato-unbound.org...) I do acknowledge that there has been some botched death penalties, but there will always be a slim margin for error reguardless how much we are technologically advanced, because due to the Theory of Infinate Probability there will always be a margin for everything no matter what it is or how small it is. The rate for shark attacks are incredably small and they are smaller then the chance of someone being struck by lightning twice, but it still happens. Contention 3: "Easy" Way out. My opponent may state that this might lead to psychological torture, but when this is observed the prison life isn't that bad. They get free TV, internet, a gym, and they can get a college degree for FREE. So in America, if you're poor, just commit a crime and you're taken care of. Plus there are some criminals that don't feel sorry for their crimes. (Now I know that he's a fictional character, but I'm going to use him as an example) Hanibal Lector killed several people and didn't feel any remorse for the crimes that he's committed. Prisons are also over crowed and it's overly expensive to keep someone in jail. It costs the US $160,000 per year per one criminal in jail and that's more then I mate in a few years of working. (http://america.aljazeera.com...) Prisons are also overly crowed and there is several thousand people in jail and there is now too many people. Cutting out the Death Penalty means more people in jail and more expense for the US. (http://www.bbc.com...)