It's morally permissible to kill domestic abusers

Ladies and gents, it's kritik time!A. Links: The affirmative’s plea for self-defense as an exception to traditional moral prohibitions on violence cedes the value of a person’s life to what Roman law referred to as Homo Sacer -- a grey zone where we don’t execute someone but their killing is permissible. Agamben 1:[1]“the sovereignty of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide. The … category of “life devoid of value” … corresponds exactly … to the bare life of homo sacer and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. … every “politicization” of life … implies a new decision concerning … which life … becomes only “sacred life,” and can as such be eliminated without punishment. … Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.”B. Impacts: The aff’s return to homo sacer turns the AC both ideologically and contention-wise since they defeat the purpose of self-defense while also permitting more violations of worth. Their approach to politics creates a structure that perpetuates violence. Agamben 2:“homo sacer is … the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed. This violence – the unsanctionable killing that, … anyone may commit … this violence opens a sphere of human action that is neither the sphere of sacrum facere nor that of profane action. … once brought back to his proper place beyond both penal law and sacrifice, homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. The political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide. … sacred life … is the life that has been captured in this sphere.” This turns the AC since 1) they say we have to protect ourselves but they permit constant violations of worth by replicating bare life. 2) Homo sacer allows exclusion which permits killing within ethics and thus they allow for more domestic violence by justifying exceptions to our traditional moral framework.C. The alternative is to adopt a non-violent embrace of the grievability of life. No life is viewed as homo sacer when life is viewed as grievable and precarious. Butler:[2]“non-violence is … the norms that differentiate between those lives that count as livable and grievable and those that do not. Only on the condition that lives are grievable … does the call to non-violence avoid complicity with forms of epistemic inegailitarianism. The desire to commit violence is thus always attendee by the anxiety of having violence returned, since all the potential actors in the scene are equally vulnerable. Even when such an insight follows from a calculation of the consequences of a violent act, it testifies to an ontological interrelation that is prior to any calculation. … we do not need to know in advance what a life will be, but only to find and support those modes of representation and appearance that allow the claim of life to be made and heard. … It is also to struggle against those notions of the political subject that assume that permeability and injurability can be monopolized at one site and fully refused at another. …” But then, go to his case.To start off at the first part of his argument, it's not my job to interpret the resolution. Resolutions are made to be broad to allow both sides equal access to argumentation and topic literature. But to actual arguments now!First, TURN THE AC – they claim deadly force can better the victim’s life but it just lands you in prison. 80% of women who kill their abusers go to jail and have no voice in the matter. Leanord 01:[3] “ [80%] of women accused of killing their abusive partner … are convicted … and … receive long, … sentences … even when self-defense laws fit the homicide … lawyers and judges may not apply the laws properly … Battered women in prison have [also] been rendered nearly invisible … by being female in a male-dominated society; … and by the shame they feel as a result of ongoing victimization; …” And, women’s prison abuse is worse than domestic violence. Buchanan 07:[4] “sexual abuse by guards in women’s prisons is … widespread … [and] … institutionalized … Women … are subjected to … systematic forms of sexual abuse: … coercion of sex for drugs, favors, or protection; … Such open … abuses would seem … easy for a prison administration to detect and prevent if it chose to do so. “ Prison violence directly outweighs the harms of domestic violence: a) Domestic violence is physical less than half the time. Milgram:[5] "domestic violence statistics [show] … Assaults account … for 43 percent … and harassment account[s] … for 43 percent … of …reported offenses …" b) Victims have no recourse in prisons since they can't leave and their abusers are the ones charged with protecting them, whereas they can run away or call the police outside of prison. This means even a risk of escaping domestic violence makes it preferable to prison violence. Then, go to this idea that victims can't leave their abusers:First, TURN: If victims can’t leave abusive situations for economic reasons, or fear, then killing won’t help. They might still feel retribution from the family, would be economically worse, and would feel regret for their crime. Thus, killing their abuser does not do anything to empower the victim, but rather leaves them in the same psychological situation.Second, Doesn’t Matter: Even if the victim can’t leave their situation, it doesn’t justify the use of deadly force, because morality is not necessarily equated with running out of necessary options.Now onto the idea that the police can't protect victims:First, TURN: If the police system is truly flawed, then it might mistake a victim’s use of deadly force for something it isn’t, which would put both the victim at risk and their freedom. In other words, it is comparatively better for the victim to simply report the abuse and, even if the response might not be totally adequate, it will be better than possibly getting arrested for murder.Second, Doesn’t Matter: Even if there are flaws in the police system, it doesn’t justify the use of deadly force because the victim can still find ways for their batterer to be arrested. Clearly, abusers are arrested frequently, so obviously the flaws in the police system are not that influential.Third, TURN: The failures in the police system just give the state an incentive to clean up both the police and legal system, or risk protest from battered women. This outweighs on a level of masking because it actually works to solve the problem at its root.And, on the idea that the legal system can't protect victims:First, Protection laws don’t fail since if the perpetrator has committed repeated domestic abuse, he will be more strongly punished, which means that his protection order will be more stringently enforced.Second, TURN: If the legal system really does view domestic abuse so loosely, then they will be less likely to justify the victim’s use of deadly force. This creates a more stringent ruling against the victim, which either means that the resolution is conceptually negated, or that the victim is punished. This outweighs because it causes more harm to the actual victim. If the goal of the deadly force is to ensure that the victim has agency, then throwing them in jail leads to less agency.Third, TURN: If protection laws aren’t enforceable, then this gives government more incentive to make laws more stringent to protect women and to avoid protest. If there really is a clear cut failure in the system, killing the abusers won’t do a thing; rather, we need to fix the system, not just get the victims in more trouble. This outweighs on a level of masking because while killing the perpetrator simply covers up the problem, rectifying the problems in the system allows for a better solution.Fourth, Even if the protection orders aren’t sufficient, there are always other avenues to pursue; if the victim has gotten far enough out of the situation to actually get a court order, then they can push for an arrest or a stronger punishment.So in conclusion, there are plenty of alternatives for victims to go down that don't require deadly force, and even if these alts aren't actually there, the harms are greater in killing still than in not killing. The resolution is negated. [1] Giorgio Agamben. HOMO SACER: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press 1995. [2] Judith Butler, PhD, Yale, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?”, Verso, 2009, [3] Elizabeth Leonard 2001 Convicted Survivors: Comparing and Describing California's Battered Women Inmates [4] Kim Shayo Buchanan [JSD Candidate, Columbia Law School; Sessional Assistant Professor, Criminology/Law and Society, York University], “Impunity: Sexual Abuse in Women’s Prisons,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Vol 42, 2007 [5] Anne Milgram [Attorney General, State of New Jersey], Colonel Joseph R. Fuentes [Superintendent, New Jersey State Police], Major James S. Beshada [Commanding Officer, Identification and Information Technology Section, New Jersey State Police], Chief Robert Coulton [Ewing Township Police Department, President, New Jersey Association of Chiefs of Police], “Twenty-Sixth Annual Domestic Violence Offense Report,” Domestic Violence in New Jersey, December 2008.