October beginner's tournament: The USA should get rid of the death penalty

In this round, I will provide a critique of my opponent’s argument (rebuttal). May the best debater win! Contention 1: the death penalty prevents murders To start out his contention, my opponent states that almost 12,000 murders happened in the U. S. last year. Then, he provides a quote from Emory University that states that for every execution from capital punishment, an average of 18 fewer murders are committed, give or take 10. Firstly, I find no evidence of the provided statistic (12,000 murders) in my opponent’s source to date. This is a completely false assertion too, as the total murder in 2014 totalled at about (1) 14,000. Secondly, the quote my opponent provides has little or none significance in regards to the point he is trying to prove. The quote inserted into his argument does not provide any evidence as to why we can use previous murders to prevent future ones. Secondly, I checked his source, and the actual text shows that every execution results in the deterrence of at least 8 murders, with a 95% confidence level. The death penalty does not effectively affect the murder rates throughout the country, and the sources from my previous argument prove that. Also, people are often put on death row for lengthy amounts of time, and that time is increasing. (2) The time prisoners stay on death row has been significantly increasing over the years, as seen on the graph. Right now, the average prisoner on death row spends 15.8 years before their execution. If the executions resulting from capital punishment are a strong deterrent, then how are they going to take their full effect throughout the nation if the prisoners are often abandoned for 15 years and then executed? The death penalty is an ineffective policy, and it is not a successful deterrent of murders in our nation, and I have provided many more tangible sources that provide empirical evidence to support this point. Contention 2: the death penalty is a tool to help police in investigations To start of his contention, my opponent states that in “many countries” a culprit gets a lesser form of punishment if he/she cooperates with the police. I would just like to point out that we are talking about the United States in this particular debate, not any other country in the world. Next, my opponent asserts that capital punishment can be used as a bargaining chip in serious cases to coerce suspects into cooperation with police. While this may be effective in solving the intricacies of some cases, this is morally questionable, if not indefensible. In essence, my opponent is defending the death penalty by saying that if police threaten suspects with death, they will be able to get more information out of them. I think, that in a just society, death threats should not be a means of interrogation. Secondly, my opponent uses the bargaining chip argument to state that using capital punishment as a threat is a time saver for cops. My opponent completely brushes off the moral implications of this statement, and fails to provide any resolutional substance as to why this is one of the reasons the death penalty should be implemented across the United States and kept in operation. In summary, threatening death to glean information out of suspects is wrong, and if that is what the death penalty is for, then it should be gotten rid of and abolished. Contention 3: the death penalty provides relief for victims The focus of this contention is on the feeling of vengeance for the families of victims that results from the execution of suspects. Relief for the families of victims comes at the price of shorter prison sentences, and there cannot be any median. We should not focus on enacting vengeance on behalf of grief-stricken families, and instead make sure that their killers are locked up in prisons for the rest of their lives, closed off from the outside world, and unable to do harm to anyone or anything else. These are the core principles behind even having prisons, and the death penalty is just an egregious way of enacting vengeance on violent criminals. Our duty to our people is not to be a harbinger of death, but an upholder of justice. A quid-pro-quo approach to justice is not what any just society would take, and it taints the pillars on which our justice system is built. If we are to accurately and unabashedly carry out justice in our nation, suspects who have been accused of committing the most violent of crimes should be brought before a court, tried, and if found guilty, put into jail for life. Knowing that the enactor of harm and violence is completely closed off from the outside world and unable to do any more harm is closure enough for those grieving. Life imprisonment is superior to capital punishment because instead of the execution of a murderous criminal, they are locked up, unable to cause any more harm or hurt anyone else. The difference between capital punishment and life imprisonment is that execution of offenders is not an ideal solution to criminal activity, and is essentially the government killing off criminals for revenge. Vengeance goes against our standard code of justice because our judicial process is about equality and fairness in the deciding of criminal sentencing. Undermining the long lasting equality in the justice system and implementing the death penalty throughout the United States is detrimental, not only to fairness, but to morality. Morality plays a big part in the judicial process, and having capital punishment forces those in the jury to act emotionally and think on the side of the victim, and how much grief they have been caused. Violent murders resulting in sentencing of capital punishment is often decided with feelings, because those in the jury cannot help but think about if their loved ones or friends had been the victims of these crimes. This is where unfairness and inequality come into play in regards to capital punishment, because it is hard not to take the emotional route and subjectively prefer the case of the victim. The point of trials is to determine guilt or innocence, and capital punishment greatly hinders that ability. Overview: Throughout his arguments, my opponent provides arguments devoid of both logical reasoning and morality. Deterrence, death threats as a bargaining chip, and closure for victims’ families are all examples of this. These arguments provide little to no substance in regards to the resolution, in which my opponent is supposed to argue why the death penalty should be kept, and why it should be implemented into states that do not currently have it (the U. S. does not have capital punishment in every state). For these reasons, I stand with my critique of my opponent’s arguments. Conclusion: Once again, I would like to thank my opponent for partaking in this debate with me, and I hand it over to you Con! Sources: . https://www.fbi.gov... . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...