BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
The Catholic Church has long opposed the death penalty

"A Culture of Life and the Death Penalty, A Statement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Calling for an End to the Death Penalty". 2005. - While complex, the teaching of the Universal Church is clear. It has developed over time and has been taught most powerfully in the words and witness of Pope John Paul II. Catholic teaching on the death penalty is clearly articulated in the encyclical The Gospel of Life, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. In Catholic teaching the state has the recourse to impose the death penalty upon criminals convicted of heinous crimes if this ultimate sanction is the only available means to protect society from a grave threat to human life. However, this right should not be exercised when other ways are available to punish criminals and to protect society that are more respectful of human life (ie. life without parole).
Criminals fear death and the death penalty

Pro Death Penalty Webpage - Abolitionists also hold the notion that criminals do not fear death because they do not take time to think about the consequences of their acts. If that were true, then I wonder how police officers manage to arrest criminals without killing them. When a policeman holds a criminal at gunpoint and tells him to get on the ground, the criminal will comply fully in the vast majority of of these cases. Why would they do that unless they were afraid of the lethal power of the gun? It is because regardless of what abolitionists claim, criminals are not immune to fear! It is a common misconception to believe that fear is a thought process that has to be worked out with a piece of paper. It's not! It is an instinct that automatically kicks in when one is faced with lethal force! The examples below should confirm that point.
Bible's "an eye for an eye" does not support death penalty

The United Methodist Church. "In Opposition to Capital Punishment". 2004 - "In spite of a common assumption to the contrary, 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' does not give justification for the imposing of the penalty of death. Jesus explicitly repudiated retaliation (Matthew 5:38-39), and the Talmud denies its literal meaning and holds that it refers to financial indemnities. Christ came among us and suffered death. Christ also rose to new life for the sake of all. His suffering, death, and resurrection brought a new dimension to human life, the possibility of reconciliation with God through repentance. This gift is offered to all without exception, and human life was given new dignity and sacredness through it. The death penalty, however, denies Christ's power to transform and restore all human beings. In the New Testament, when a woman having committed a crime was brought before Jesus, He persisted in questioning her accusers, so that they walked away (John 8:1-11)."
National hysteria can lead to unjust convictions and execution

As with the famous case of the Rosenburgs, capital punishment is sometimes carried out in response to national hysteria. Following public opinion, therefore, is a dangerous approach to capital punishment. Much of the societal conditions which condition persons to the idea of state sponsored executions are the same that are shared by those willing to sacrifice occasionally innocent and later exonerated inmates - so long as the process could retain good enough face to keep capital punishment operating.
The death penalty deters crime only if it is a certainty

When the death penalty is a 100% assured punishment for certain crimes, it has a strong deterrent effect. When it is a possible, "maybe" punishment, it has a much less certain deterrent effect. In the United States, few states have established capital punishment as a 100% certain punishment, with it generally being a very rare and arbitrary practice. This is one of the reasons why its deterrent effect is unclear in the states, and why US-focused studies (used frequently by anti-death penalty advocates) are less credible in determining the real deterrent effect of capital punishment. Looking to cases around the world where it is a certainty show a closer causality between capital punishment and crime-deterrence.
The death penalty is proportional punishment/due desert for murder

US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Majority opinion in 7-2 ruling that the death penalty is a constitutionally acceptable form of punishment for premeditated murder. 2 Jul. 1976. - "We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes."[1]
The death penalty is a just means of protecting society

Steven Farrell, professor of political economy at George Wythe College. "A Conservative Case for the Capital Punishment". 18 Mar. 2005 - "The legitimate role of government involves the protection of life, liberty and property. Just as the role of the government is to raise an armed force and rain down deadly force upon a bloodthirsty invading army, so also the government is duty bound to inflict death upon the man who chooses to slaughter fellow citizens in their own backyards. Few, if any, object to the use of deadly force against an invading army. Yet those invading soldiers, ordered to fight and likely whipped up by propaganda to go into battle, are far less deserving of death than the assailant who has been proven guilty and convicted in a court of law, by a jury of his peers, of shedding the innocent blood of his neighbor – and this of his own free will. Yet we do and must condone war in such situations. Governments must protect life. This is no less true regarding individual life."
Risk of executing innocent people undermines death penalty

Since 1973, 123 in 25 US states have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence.[10] The Innocence project indicated that more than 150 people have been exonerated on the basis of DNA testing that concluded that they were innocent.[11] This appears to create a likelihood that many individuals have actually been executed that were innocent. This is too many, particularly when the executed are seen as innocent victims of the state. This is harmful to the state and the judicial system, and is sufficient evidence to shut down the practice.
Executions help society express horror and abhorrence of murder

Don Feder, Boston Herald Columnist. "McVeigh Makes the Case for Capital Punishment". 21 May 2001 - "Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices...A murderer sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole can still laugh, learn and love, listen to music and read, form friendships, and do the thousand-and-one things (mundane and sublime) forever foreclosed to his victims."
Costs of capital punishment are irrelevant to justice

New Jersey Senator John F. Russo (D). "Don't Abolish the Death Penalty, Fix it". Baltimore Sun. 1 Mar. 2007 - "It doesn't matter what it costs. The taking of a human life is something far too important to be influenced either way by costs. Similarly, it has been said that the death penalty diverts resources from services for victims. Whether or not the state has the death penalty, victims of violent crime can and should be given appropriate services to cope with their loss."
Deterrence is not a necessary pillar of the case for the death penalty

Thomas R. Eddlem. "Ten anti-death penalty fallacies". The New American. 3 June 2002 - "Death penalty opponents love to assume that the principal purpose for capital punishment is deterrence, possibly realizing it is a perfect straw argument. Tangible proof of deterrence alone is not a valid reason for capital punishment (or any other form of punishment, for that matter), nor is it the main rationale employed by astute death penalty advocates. As Christian writer C.S. Lewis observes, '[deterrence] in itself, would be a very wicked thing to do. On the classical theory of punishment it was of course justified on the ground that the man deserved it. Why, in Heaven's name, am I to be sacrificed to the good of society in this way?-unless, of course, I deserve it.' Inflicting a penalty merely to deter -- rather than to punish for deeds done -- is the very definition of cruelty. A purely deterrent penalty is one where a man is punished -- not for something that he did -- but for something someone else might do. Lewis explained the logical end of this argument: 'If deterrence is all that matters, the execution of an innocent man, provided the public think him guilty, would be fully justified.'" Men should be punished for their own crimes and not merely to deter others. That said, the death penalty undoubtedly does deter in some cases. For starters, those executed will no longer be around to commit any more crimes."
Wrongful executions cannot be corrected, violating due process

Benjamin Weiser, NYTimes columnist. "A Legal Quest Against the Death Penalty". NYTimes. 2 Jan. 2005 - "DISPLAYING ABSTRACT - Judge Jed S Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan discusses novel legal argument against capital punishment which he developed while overseeing death penalty case; interview; his 2002 ruling pointed to increasing number of DNA exonerations and wondered whether death penalty violates due process because executed prisoners cannot pursue claims of innocence."
Life imprisonment does not repudiate murder like capital punishment

Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist. "The feeble 'arguments' against capital punishment". Jewish World Review. 19 June 2001 - "'The loss of freedom for the remainder of one's life is no mild punishment,' James Bernstein of New York wrote to the Times. 'We do not need the death penalty to express society's utter repudation of those who would take the lives of others.'
Executions punish the guilty so can't encourage killing the innocent

Thomas R. Eddlem. "Ten anti-death penalty fallacies". The New American. 3 June 2002 - "If capital punishment teaches that it's permissible to kill, do prison sentences teach that it's permissible to hold someone against his will, and do fines teach that it's permissible to steal? In actuality, this fallacy confuses killing the innocent with punishing the guilty. To punish the guilty via the death penalty is not to condone the shedding of innocent blood. Just the opposite, in fact, since capital punishment sends a strong message that murder and other capital crimes will not be tolerated."
Individuals are executed on murder charges whom deserved manslaughter

"Thoughts on the death penalty". Retrieved 1 May 2008 - "The person convicted of the murder may have actually killed the victim and may even admit having done so but does not agree that the killing was murder. Often the only people who know what really happened are the accused and the deceased. It then comes down to the skill of the prosecution and defence lawyers as to whether there will be a conviction for murder or for manslaughter. It is thus highly probable that people are convicted of murder when they should really have only been convicted of manslaughter."
Death penalty addresses crimes where victim can never be compensated

Steven Farrell. "A Conservative Case for the Capital Punishment". 18 Mar. 2005 - "If one robs a store, the captured thief can pay back the debt and, in fact, under biblical law (which is better than today's law) would be tasked to work for the man he robbed until the debt was satisfied seven times the value of the goods stolen. With such a bounteous payback, the thief is then freed and, by his honorable labor, restored to a position of trust..." Farrell continues that murder is not a repayable crime, that society can never again trust that person again, and that the person, therefore, permanently forfeits all rights as a citizen, including the right to life.
Capital punishment protects more innocents than it does accidentally take the life of innocent convicts.

While it is possible that an innocent person may be executed through capital punishment, more innocent people have been killed by released, paroled or escaped murderers than innocent people executed. If a society chooses not to execute its most dangerous members, it risks these people killing again. The risk of innocent people being killed exists on both sides of the topic. It is wrong for the affirmative to assert that the risk of innocent lives being lost exists only when a society uses the death penalty. It would be difficult if not impossible to determine whether more innocent lives are risked on either side of this topic. Unless the affirmative could prove that a society that employs the the death penalty will always end up killing more innocent people than it saves, the death penalty cannot be said to be inherently immoral. So long as a just society reasonably believes that using the death penalty will protect human lives and is shown no evidence to the contrary, it could justly use the death penalty.
Executing killers is not comparable to raping rapists

"The Death Penalty: Morally Defensible?". Casey's Critical Thinking - "Abolitionists often insist that if we argue for lex talion justice we must be prepared to rape rapists, beat sadists, and burn down the houses of arsonists...Why then, if it is not morally okay to rape rapists, is it acceptable to execute murderers? The answer is simple. There is no redeeming value to carrying out the former punishment. Raping the rapist will only cause someone else to degrade themselves by doing it. It will not prevent the rapist from raping again. Executing murderers, however, prevents them from committing their crime again, and thus protects innocent victims. The good, therefore, outweighs the bad, and the executioner is morally justified in taking the murderer's life."[2]
Capital punishment costs more than life without parole

Hugo Adam Bedau, Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and writing for the ACLU. "The Case Against the Death Penalty". 1992 - "Considerable delay in carrying out the death sentence is unavoidable, given the procedural safeguards required by the courts in capital cases. Starting with empaneling the trial jury, murder trials take far longer when the death penalty is involved. Post-conviction appeals in death-penalty cases are far more frequent as well. All these factors increase the time and cost of administering criminal justice. The sobering lesson is that we can reduce such delay and costs only by abandoning the procedural safeguards and constitutional rights of suspects, defendants, and convicts, with the attendant high risk of convicting the wrong person and executing the innocent."
Deterrent of capital punishment varies across the states.

-"on average, the states where capital punishment deters murder execute many more people than do the states where capital punishment incites crime or has no effect.Using various statistical techniques, I show that a threshold number of executions for deterrence exists, which is approximately nine executions during the sample period. In states that conducted more executions than the threshold, executions, on average,deterred murder. In states that conducted fewer executions than the threshold, the average execution increased the murder rate or had no effect."
Capital punishment is not "unusual" ("cruel and unusual")

Thomas R. Eddlem. "Ten anti-death penalty fallacies". The New American. 3 June 2002. - "The death penalty is not unusual. All of the nations of the world have had the death penalty on the law books throughout most of their recorded history, and the death penalty remains on the statute books of about half of the nations of the world. The death penalty was on the statute books of all the states of the U.S. when the Constitution was adopted. It is far more unusual to have no death penalty than to have a death penalty."
The death penalty is about punishment/due desert, not vengeance

David Gelernter. "What do Murderers Deserve?". Commentary Magazine. March/April 1999 - "Opponents of capital punishment describe it as a surrender to emotions--to grief, rage, fear, blood lust. For most supporters of the death penalty, this is false. Even when we resolve in principle to go ahead, we have to steel ourselves. Many of us would find it hard to kill a dog, much less a man. Endorsing capital punishment means not that we yield to our emotions but that we overcome them. If we favor executing murderers, it is not because we want to but because, however much we do not want to, we consider ourselves obliged to."
Capital punishment wastes time and energy and burdens courts

Hugo Adam Bedau. "The Case Against The Death Penalty". American Civil Liberties Union. 1992 - "Capital punishment wastes resources. It squanders the time and energy of courts, prosecuting attorneys, defense counsel, juries, and courtroom and correctional personnel. It unduly burdens the system of criminal justice, and it is therefore counterproductive as an instrument for society's control of violent crime. It epitomizes the tragic inefficacy and brutality of the resort to violence rather than reason for the solution of difficult social problems."
It is impossible to determine that deterrence is not working

John Stuart Mill, in a speech in favor of capital punishment - "As for what is called the failure of death punishment, who is able to judge of that? We partly know who those are whom it has not deterred; but who is there who knows whom it has deterred, or how many human beings it has saved who would have lived to be murderers if that awful association had not been thrown round the idea of murder from their earliest infancy?"[21]
Death penalty can/should inflict pain on murderers; due desert

Bob Greene. "Who Weeps for the Blood of the Weiler Family?". Chicago Tribune. 14 July 1999 - "When Allen Lee Davis got a nosebleed during his execution, it caused an uproar. Few of those crying foul even knew what he had done to deserve execution." Some go beyond this, arguing that causing pain to the executed is justified as a proportional (due desert) response to the heinous crimes they've committed.
Eternal torture worse than clean break

Imagine this room. It's a dirty, unkept room, with cockroaches and rats looking for bits of food. The people living near you are ready to kill, rape, and hurt you. The food is horrible. You feel terror in the night when you hear someone being beaten up. Now, this is life imprisonment, and you have to live this way until the rest of your life. Now, the death penalty. It's a clean break, where you are shown in TV, have a conjugal visit, have an expensive, delicious last meal, then you are painlessly killed by lethal injection. It's humane and painless. Now, compare these two punishments. Life imprisonment is certainly worse than death penalty. Life imprisonment is the same as torture, while in the death penalty, you get a clean, painless break wihtout having remorse for your crimes. Plus you shouldn't have committed a murder if your life is perfect. If you got a happy family and people that care about, you shouldn't even be thinking about murdering someone unless you have a reason for wanting life imprisonment, or the death penalty. A perfect life is when you have people who love you and you love them back. One of the many reason someone might chose to do something against the law is because they are after money, too much money.
Life in prison deters crime/murder as well as the death penalty

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput. "Justice, Mercy, and Capital Punishment". 2005 - "The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains it in these words: If 'non-lethal means [such as life without parole] are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor [i.e., the convicted murderer], authority [should] limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person'. (2267). John Paul II, writing in The Gospel of Life, stressed that 'the nature and extent of the punishment [for capital crimes] must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not to go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity; in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements to the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent' (no. 56). In modern industrialized states, killing convicted murderers adds nothing to anyone’s safety. It is an excess. It cannot be justified except in the most extraordinary conditions."
Capital punishment does not deter crime

Jeffrey Fagan, Columbia Law Professor. "Deterrence and the Death Penalty: A Critical Review of the New Evidence". Testimony to the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Codes and other committees on the Future of Capital Punishment in the State of New York. 21 Jan. 2005 - "These new studies [that claim a new evidence supports the conclusion that capital punishment has a positive deterrent effect] are fraught with technical and conceptual errors: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider all the relevant factors that drive murder rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, and the absence of any direct test of deterrence. These studies fail to reach the demanding standards of social science to make such strong claims, standards such as replication and basic comparisons with other scenarios. Some simple examples and contrasts, including a careful analysis of the experience in New York State compared to others, lead to a rejection of the idea that either death sentences or executions deter murder."
Executions are cruel and unusual punishment, violating human rights

The death penalty is severe in the damage it causes to the human body. Inflicting mortal damage on the human body, whether by electric chair or lethal injection, is equivalent to or even worse than torture, and violates basic human rights that are inherent and irrevocable. The death penalty is also cruel and torturous in the way that it inflicts psychological damage on convicts that wait on death row.
The executed guilty cannot be equated with aborted unborn innocent

Thomas R. Eddlem. "Ten anti-death penalty fallacies". The New American. June 3, 2002 - "A related fallacy is that the pro-lifer who defends the right to life of an unborn baby in the mother's womb, but who does not defend the right to life of a convicted murderer on death row, is being morally inconsistent. But there is no inconsistency here: The unborn baby is innocent; the convicted murderer is not. It is the proabortion/anti-death penalty liberal who is morally inconsistent, since he supports putting to death only the innocent.
Executions give solace to families; killer will never kill again

Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist. "The feeble 'arguments' against capital punishment". Jewish World Review. 19 June 2001 - "The families of murder victims do not stop mourning when the killer dies, but for many, there is indeed a measure of solace in knowing that the monster who destroyed their loved one will never hurt anyone again. Abolishing executions certainly won't bring 'closure' to grieving relatives. On the contrary, it will deepen their torment, mocking them each time they remember that the person they loved is in the grave, while his killer continues to breathe."