"Society should use the death penalty as a form of criminal punishment"

1. Murderers rarely escape and murder again There is almost no risk that murderers will escape from prison and then proceed to murder again. Murderers are housed in maximum security prisons. As shown in the previous round, the number of prisoners escaping from these facilities is extremely low. My opponent argues that 67% of inmates who break out of prison will commit serious crimes. This is not correct and my opponent has misread his own source. His source states that “67% of inmates RELEASED from state prisons in 1994” committed a serious crime within three years.[1] This statistic tells us nothing about prison escapees and is not relevant to our discussion. My opponent has not provided any evidence that murderers are escaping from prisons and harming other people. And, I have provided evidence showing that escapes from maximum security facilities are extremely rare. Thus, the evidence supports that murderers can be safely incarcerated within maximum security prisons without concern that they will escape and harm other people. 2. The Death Penalty is extraordinarily expensive In the previous rounds, I noted that the death penalty is extraordinarily expensive. Death row inmates must be housed in specialized facilities and are afforded extremely expensive judicial procedures – including lengthy pre-trial and trial phases, automatic appeals, state habeas corpus process, and federal habeas corpus protections.[2] Death row inmates aren't executed immediately. They sit on death row in these costly, specialized facilities for decades while they meander through expensive appeals processes that cost taxpayers billions of dollars. By way of example, I pointed to California which has incurred $4,000,000,000 in taxpayer costs due to the death penalty. My opponent says that because these costs are since 1978, that $4,000,000,000 is not much money. However, it is important to remember that only 13 people have been executed in California since 1978.[3] Therefore, each execution in California since 1978 has cost taxpayers $308,000,000. Consider that point again – each individual execution has cost $308 million dollars. This is an absurdly high cost. My opponent also argues that, in California, sentencing juveniles to lifetime imprisonment will cost more than the death penalty. He cites a source that states that the 2,600 juveniles serving life sentences in California will cost $6.4 billion. Unfortunately, this number proves nothing and tells us nothing. We can’t compare the cost my opponent has provided with the cost of the death penalty. Why not? First, they compare different amounts of prisoners. Second, they compare different periods of time. First, we would be comparing the costs associated with two different numbers of prisoners. My opponent says 2,600 juveniles with life-terms will cost $6.4 billion. But, 2,600 prisoners is 4 times as many prisoners as there are on death row. There are 700 prisoners on death row in California. We simply can’t compare these costs when they do not involve an equal number of prisoners. If we use my opponent’s numbers to calculate the theoretical cost of 700 juveniles with life imprisonment, we can see the cost is $1.7 billion for 700 lifetime prisoners, which is much less than the $4 billion for 700 death row inmates. Thus, my opponent’s source supports my argument that the death penalty is more expensive than life-without-parole. Second, juveniles sentenced to lifetime imprisonment are by definition under the age of 18. Assuming these prisoners live to 70, they will be imprisoned for at least 52 years. However, the death penalty has only been instituted since 1978, a period of 34 years. We can’t compare costs when the costs are associated with considerably different timeframes. Thus, my opponent’s source that 2,600 life-term juveniles cost $6.4 billion is not useful for comparison. If we want to compare the costs of housing death row prisoners and the costs of housing life-without-parole prisoners, we need only look at the previous rounds. In my previous round, I cited a study showing that housing an inmate on death row costs $100,000 more per year than housing that exact same prisoner in the general population of a maximum security prison.[4] This considerable extra cost does not even include the other judicial and procedural costs associated with the death penalty. I have shown that the death penalty is incredibly costly. It wastes taxpayer dollars by requiring specialized facilities to house death row inmates and wasteful judicial processes, appeals, and petitions. These costs can be easily eliminated by simply removing the death penalty. These taxpayer savings could then be utilized in areas that would be more beneficial to society – such as police enforcement and prisoner rehabilitation. 3. Erroneous conviction of innocent people is morally unacceptable The death penalty imposes an enormous moral cost on society. Not only does the death penalty presume that society has a right to take human life, but it presumes that society finds it acceptable to take innocent human life in the pursuit of exacting its retribution. The criminal justice system is fallible, and as many as 20,000 current U.S. prisoners are predicted to be innocent.[5] Very few of these prisoners will be exonerated because the criminal justice system is not designed to help free innocent people. Some of these prisoners, and some in the past, are innocent individuals who will lose their lives because of erroneous convictions. My opponent says life-without-parole is the same as execution because in both cases “they get their lives taken away from them.” I will not contribute a new argument in this final round, but I will respond that it is clear that these two punishments are not equivalent. In one case, a person has been killed and can clearly no longer experience life. In the other case, a person is alive and able to experience life, but confined within a particular space. These are very different punishments. While it is horrible to think that an innocent person could be sentenced to life-without-parole, it is even worse to think that they might be executed. In one case, that innocent person would still be able to experience life. In the other, all opportunity for any experience has been snuffed out. The criminal justice system is an imperfect system created and run by imperfect people. Tens of thousands of individuals have been wrongfully convicted due to eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, unvalidated forensic science, government misconduct, and bad lawyering.[6] When the risk of error is so high – even more so amongst the poor – it is morally unacceptable to have a punishment that is so extreme. CONCLUSION As my opponent properly states, the death penalty comes down to two issues: (1) financial costs, and (2) moral costs. Both of these costs could be eliminated by using life-without-parole instead of the death penalty. The financial costs of the death penalty are enormous. These billions of dollars could instead be used to improve education, police enforcement, healthcare, prisoner rehabilitation, or any other number of valuable societal goals. The moral costs of the death penalty are also unacceptable. The death penalty is retributive. Death row inmates are already imprisoned and no threat to society at large. They cannot escape. Executing them serves only to exact societal revenge. When so many innocent people are constantly being convicted of crimes they did not commit, it is morally unacceptable to have a draconian form of criminal punishment that will invariable kill innocent people, stealing away their lives and their experiences. Together, these two immense costs weigh heavily against the death penalty. The death penalty provides society with no clear benefits, and only serves to burden it. Removing the death penalty and applying life-without-parole will lift that burden and free society to use its financial and moral resources toward more valuable pursuits.