100 debate challenge 4: This House supports the death penalty

I accept my opponent's definition, and thank him for accepting the 4th of my 100 simultanious debates (Or as close as I can get the 100 debates together.) 1. Deters Murders The death penalty deters murders. Studies have been done to show that as many as 74 lives are saved per execution [1]. "In the early 1980s, the return of the death penalty was associated with a drop in the number of murders. In the mid-to-late 1980s, when the number of executions stabilized at about 20 per year, the number of murders increased. Throughout the 1990s, our society increased the number of executions, and the number of murders plummeted. Since 2001, there has been a decline in executions and an increase in murders."[2} At the time some people thought this could be coincidence so a regression anlysis was done and showed that there was less than a 1 in 18,000 chance that the correlation wasn't random. Pretty much any study on the death penalty you look at since the 90s shows that the death penalty and actual execution have a real deterrent effect and actually saves lives. [2][3][4][5] Cass Sunstein writes " If the recent evidence of deterrence is ultimately shown to be correct, then opponents of capital punishment will face an uphill struggle on moral grounds. If each execution saves many innocent lives, the harms of capital punishment would have to be very great to justify its abolition"[6] My opponent may show a nuber of death penalty states where it seems that detterence isn't working but A recent study offers more refined findings. "A recent study offers more refined findings.34 Disaggregating the data on a state-by-state basis, Joanna Shepherd finds that the nationwide deterrent effect of capital punishment is entirely driven by only six states—and that no deterrent effect can be found in the twenty-one other states that have restored capital punishment.35 What distinguishes the six from the twenty-one? The answer, she contends, lies in the fact that states showing a deterrent effect are executing more people than states that are not." [6][7] Conclusion The death penalty saves lives plain and simple. If you reject the death penalty then you do it at the cost of several innocent victims. sources [1] Cowritten with Roy Adler, "Capital Punishment Works," online.wsj.com, Nov. 2, 2007 [2] See Ehrlich, supra note 18, at 398; Isaac Ehrlich, Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Additional Evidence, 85 J. POL. ECON. 741 (1977). [3] See Dezhbakhsh et al., supra note 9, at 373 [4] Zimmerman, Alternative Execution Methods, supra note 9; Zimmerman, State Executions, supra note 9, at 190. [5] Mocan & Gittings, supra note 9, at 453. Notably, no clear evidence of a deterrent effect from capital punishment emerges from Lawrence Katz et al., Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence, 5 AM. L. & ECON. REV. 318, 330 (2003), which finds that the estimate of deterrence is extremely sensitive to the choice of specification, with the largest estimate paralleling that in Ehrlich, supra note 18. Note, however, that the principal finding in Katz et al., supra, is that prison deaths do have a strong deterrent effect and a stunningly large one—with each prison death producing a reduction of “30-100 violent crimes and a similar number of property crimes.” Id. at 340. [6] http://www.stanfordlawreview.org... [7] Shepherd, Deterrence Versus Brutalization, supra note 9.