Resolved: The US should abolish capital punishment.

Alright, thanks to our opponents iOS6 for debating this with us, and we apologize for the delay on this post. 1) Innocent Life The National Academy of Sciences in the US reported that 4.1% of all convicted criminal defendants that are sentenced to death are actually innocent of their crimes. [1] This is a massive number of people who are falsely convicted, and while the vast majority of those weren't executed, roughly 0.5% were executed, and roughly 0.16% committed suicide. The bulk of the remainder were still on death row, and many were serving shortened prison sentences. [2] We will likely spend a lot of this debate talking about numbers of lives lost; there is little doubt that the comparison between those numbers will have some effect on the outcome of this debate. However, while we do feel that the numbers are important, we should not allow those numbers to strip out the importance of every single human life lost. They all matter, and simply comparing the overall number of people lost does nothing but relegate each life to a statistic. So, when we ask ourselves what matters most in terms of lost lives, we should delve deeper than the numbers. When a country is actively ending the lives of its own people, that is a direct action, one that is clearly being taken against a sizeable number of innocent people. As technology gets better and we move further towards better forensic methods such as using DNA to establish guilt, we can reduce the number of wrong convictions, but human error will always produce some of these. Innocent lives will still be lost, regardless of advancing technologies. This is the one thing we as a society can control: whether or not the government ends the lives of innocent citizens via the legal justice system. We would argue that any system that is ending the lives of innocents while purporting to follow the axiom of “innocent until proven guilty” is debasing justice. At the point where these lives can be and often are lost as a result of clearly unjust cases, there is no way to rectify these outcomes for those who have perished. Imprisoning people for long periods might not be a great alternative, but it's certainly better for both the justice system and for innocent lives than a system that pushes capital punishment. 2. Injustices of the capital punishment system A. Systemic bias Capital punishment ultimately serves as a disease to the poor and low income earners. Normal procedure in the court of law is that the convicted seeks an attorney for his trial date, but quite often, the poor are unable to afford a good attorney and have to rely on an assigned one. A good lawyer means a good defence, and inadequate legal representation characterizes many of the cases where the poor are accused. In the state of Alabama, 95% of death row convicts are listed as poor. This directly results from the compensation for court-appointed defense attorneys, which is grossly inadequate for the amount of work that would be required to reasonably represent their clients. The lack of post-conviction counsel just compounds the problem, allowing severe miscarriages of justice. Alabama also has a long history of racial bias with the vast majority of black death row prisoners being sentenced for killing a white victim, as well as numerous capital cases that “were reversed upon proof that prosecutors illegally excluded black people from jury service.” California is “unable to provide attorneys in a timely fashion to people sentenced to death”, resulting in many inmates having “no counsel or habeas corpus proceedings” and limited funds for defense attorneys. The War on Drugs and Three Strikes Law have had particularly egregious consequences for African Americans in California as well. Similar issues persist in Georgia, Florida, Michigan, New York, and Texas. [3] These problems are systemic, but they are specifically used to their most grievous effect when it comes to capital punishment. States that continue to allow these practices are committing egregious injustices based chiefly on class and race. B. Cruel and unusual punishment The requirement to prevent cruel and unusual punishment of convicted criminals is enshrined in our Bill of Rights, so when it comes to any form of punishment we implement, our goal should be to minimize any form of harm that goes beyond what is absolutely necessary. As such, there are two major concerns. First, there is no way to ensure that every single person who is sentenced to deal with die simply and painlessly. We should recognize that there are a lot of unknowns, even when it comes to techniques like lethal injection. Different people do respond differently to the chemicals that are injected, and in cases like Joseph Wood, this puts the convict through two hours of gasping and choking before he succumbed to 15 times the amounts of the chemicals normally used. [4] And while this is rare, it does happen more often than you'd think. 7.1% of lethal injections up to 2010 had been botched – that's over a thousand people who have had to suffer tremendously in their last hours of life, and it's a worse failure rate than gas chambers, hanging and electrocution.[5] This should be unacceptable. Not being able to breath is tremendously torturous – it's the reason we find water boarding so abhorrent. With a failure rate this high, lethal injection should be the least commonly used form of the death penalty, yet it is by far the most common, with most other methods either being blocked entirely or barely used in any state.[6] Even when lethal injection works, there's too much uncertainty. Drugs like pancoronum bromide and sodium thiopental prevent the convict from showing any signs of pain. The former is worse, as it simply paralyzes them rather than rendering them unconscious. They will endure suffocation, and since this has to be injected separately from potassium chloride, they will also have to deal with the intense burning effects of that drug.[7] Second, it's critical to understand what a death sentence means. It means that a convict is now awaiting death. Ignoring the fact that current methods come with a substantial risk of extreme suffering, these people are suffering psychologically every day that they wait for their execution. It's the reason why Judge Cormac J. Carney argued that the death penalty is a sentence that “no rational jury or legislature could impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.” The uncertainty, and the process of essentially waiting for death, let him to conclude that it “violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibilition against cruel and unusual punishment”, often requiring inmates to wait more than 19 years before execution with regular promises and push backs.[8] It's so bad that there's an actual death row syndrome, one that leads many to “lose their minds... commit suicide... [and] stop using the legal system to appeal their executions.” It's made worse by mock executions, which are also an established method of psychological torture. These people live out what remains of their life in often small, crowded cells blocked off from each other and the outside world with limited time outside of them.[9] Once again, this moves deep into the realm of cruel and unusual, subjecting inmates to unnecessary tortures. There are numerous secondary effects as well. The families of these inmates in particular are constantly awaiting their execution and reappearing repeatedly in court, often enduring blame and ostracism.[10, 11] 3. Justice for All We need to recognize that the retributive system of capital punishment is neither securing justice nor ensuring a better crime rate. This retributive system is actually rather new, since there was a shift from a more rehabilitative system in the 70s. The experiment... hasn't gone well. "As a result, the United States now has more than 2 million people in prisons or jails--the equivalent of one in every 142 U.S. residents--and another four to five million people on probation or parole. A higher percentage of the population is involved in the criminal justice system in the United States than in any other developed country.”[12] Now, we can chalk up the various problems we see here to a number of different causes. It's not our goal to show that a more retributive system caused this increase. Rather, this simply shows that retributive justice hasn't addressed the problem. Rehabilitation shouldn't just be a part of our criminal justice system – it should be its focus. There are plenty of examples of its success, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.[12] With many inmates suffering from a slew of mental illnesses, partly the result of their imprisonment, there's little doubt that the system has turned towards a more retributive model and away from rehabilitation. It's resulted in the tremendous recidivism rates we see in the U.S.[13, 14] Our opponents may argue that we can turn back towards rehabilitation while simultaneously keeping capitol punishment, but the two are fundamentally at odds. Delivering the message that there are some people beyond help that need to be executed not only dooms those specific people without offering any possibility of rehabilitation, but also sends a message to other criminals that there is a line they can cross where the criminal justice system will discard them. Sending the message that the justice system cares more about retribution than rehabilitation relegates these people to a state of permanent suffering where they know that there will be little hope for them becoming upstanding members of society. 1. http://bit.ly... 2. http://onforb.es... 3. http://bit.ly... 4. http://nbcnews.to... 5. http://bbc.in... 6. http://bit.ly... 7. http://bbc.in... 8. http://nyti.ms... 9. http://bit.ly... 10. http://bit.ly... 11. http://bit.ly... 12. http://bit.ly... 13. http://bit.ly... 14. http://1.usa.gov...