Death Penalty

Thanks for accepting :) I admire people arguing topics the personally don't agree with. Good Luck! Capital punishment does not work. There are three key reasons that support this fact. First, is the murder of innocent defendants. Second, is the exponential costs. And third, is the lack of morality in killing another human. Let"s begin by looking at the first point: the murder of innocent defendants. Imagine sweat sliding out of your pores, drenching your forehead and racing past your eyes. Imagine your stomach swirling back-and-forth, flipping around as if it is on the world"s scariest roller coaster. Imagine sleeping through the agonizing nightmare of dying, only to wake up to realize it"s your reality. Imagine waiting on death row, when you know you"re innocent. According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [1], if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would be exonerated. This is a terrifying statistic. In other words one out of every twenty-five death row sentences is wrong. As Alexander Pope said, "to err is human ."[2] We, as humans, make mistakes. We are not omniscient. Ergo, miscarriages of justice will occur. If the death penalty were not implemented and an alternative were implemented, such as life in imprisonment, we would be able to rectify our false accusations. However, if the death penalty is used, we would not be able to undo our wrongs. What good does it do to exonerate a dead man? He is still dead. Let"s consider George Stinney, a young boy put on trial for the murder of two girls. After George was handcuffed and led away from his home, he was questioned alone in a room without his parents and without an attorney.[3] Deputy Newman, who questioned George, claimed that he had admitted to the murders.[4] However, there was no physical evidence linking him to the murders and there is no written record of George's confession apart from Deputy Newman's statement.[5] Despite this lack of evidence, the entire trial process, including jury selection and deliberation, lasted less than one day and ended in George being sentenced to death. [3][5] "At the age of 14, George walked to the execution chamber with a Bible under his arm, which he later used as a booster seat in the electric chair. Standing [only] 5 foot 2 inches tall and weighing just over 90 pounds , his size (relative to the fully grown prisoners) presented difficulties in securing him to the frame holding the electrodes. The state's adult-sized face-mask didn"t fit him [either]; as he was hit with the first 2,400 V surge of electricity, the mask covering his face slipped off, "revealing his wide-open, tearful eyes and saliva coming from his mouth ... After two more jolts of electricity, the boy was dead."[6] Now, over 70 years later, George has been exonerated.[3] So, I ask all of you as being at least two years older than George, can you imagine dying tomorrow? I know I can"t. Dying is something that happens later in life, not while we"re still teenagers. But in George"s case it did happen. Not only did he suffer death, but he died with everyone in the country thinking he was a murderer. This is an irreparable injustice. The second reason the death penalty should be abolished is the astronomical costs associated with putting a person on death row, including criminal investigations, lengthy trials, and appeals. Contrary to popular belief, the death penalty is not more cost effective than other non-death alternatives, including life in prison without parole. According to a report by the Committee on Defender Services Judicial Conference of the United States [7], the average cost of defending a trial in a federal death case is $620,932, this costs around 8 times more than a trial in which the death penalty is not sought. Furthermore, according to a study by Urban Institute [8], death penalty cases in Maryland cost three times more than non-death penalty cases. In a similar study by the Seattle University of Law [9], it was concluded that each death penalty case costs an average of $1 million more than a similar case where the death penalty is not pursued. A common misconception is that the majority of costs incurred by death penalty cases occurs during appeals, however, the greatest costs associated with the death penalty occur prior to and during trial, not in post-conviction proceedings. Even if all post-conviction proceedings were abolished, the death penalty would still be more expensive than alternative sentences. Trials in which the prosecutor is seeking a death sentence have two separate and distinct phases: conviction (guilt/innocence) and sentencing. Special motions and extra time for jury selection typically precede such trials. When death penalty trials result in a verdict less than death or are reversed, taxpayers first incur all the extra costs of capital pretrial and trial proceedings and must then also pay either for the cost of incarcerating the prisoner for life or the costs of a retrial. According to the California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice, in California the current system costs $137 million per year. They also concluded that it would only cost $11.5 million for a system without the death penalty.[10] For those of you who have a hard time with math, that means we are wasting over $125 million by simply pursuing the death penalty. Thirdly, I ask you to consider the morality of killing another human being. Why does our government kill people in an attempt to demonstrate that killing is wrong? This idea of "lex talionis" is an ancient philosophy dating back to the Babylonian leader Hammurabi.[11] This code is outdated and needs to be left in the past. I ask, should society allow rape as the penalty for rape or, perhaps the burning of arsonists" homes as the penalty for arson? Even if you believe in this "eye for an eye" philosophy, you should consider the inhumanity of the death penalty. Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, describes the history of flawed executions in his 2014 book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty.[12] He reports that throughout American history, 8,776 people were executed and 276 of those executions (3.15%) went wrong in some way. Lethal injection had the highest rate of botched executions. Let"s examine the execution of Robert Wood III. On July 23, 2014 Wood was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. He was injected with a drug cocktail of midazolam and hydromorphone. He was given 15 doses of this supposed lethal combination. However, Wood gasped and snorted for well over an hour,[13] and a media witness compared Wood's breathing to a "fish gulping for air".[14] A reporter said Wood gasped more than 600 times. Experts stated that the execution should have taken about ten minutes.[15] Yet his execution began at 1:52 p.m. and ended at 3:49 p.m., lasting almost 2 hours. In conclusion, the death penalty is prone to error, full of unnecessary costs, and immoral. I look forward to my opponent's argument. Sources: [1] http://www.pnas.org... [2] http://poetry.eserver.org... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com... https://deathpenaltyinfo.org... [4] http://www.cnn.com... [5] http://www.goupstate.com... [6] https://www.theatlantic.com... [7] http://www.uscourts.gov... [8] http://www.urban.org... [9]http://law.seattleu.edu... [10]https://www.prisonlegalnews.org... [11] http://www.history.com... [12] https://www.bostonglobe.com... [13] http://www.nbcnews.com... [14] http://www.cnn.com... [15]http://www.slate.com...