Death Penalty

I'm sorry for your loss Pro. There are three things that need to be considered when deciding whether or not to employ the death penalty. I shall discuss all three, in order from least important to most important. Financial Cost Simply put, it is not cost-efficient to use the death sentence over life without parole, which is the alternative to the death penalty and vice versa. It costs 1.25 million dollars more per death penalty case than the average life without parole case[1]. I can't think of anything else to say for this portion of my argument, as it is very straightforward. Morality The death penalty adheres to the idea of an eye for an eye. Many people who look at the death penalty see it at as a no-brainer, a simple solution, equal to the crime. And it is equal to the crime, which is what's wrong with the death penalty. If a punishment is considered equal to the crime, then how can it be considered any better than the crime itself? It can't be! Imagine if the punishment for a rapist was rape, or the murderer of a family--to have his family murdered. Most civilized people would say that's going too far. And yet they are able to turn around and make an exception for the death penalty. Bottom line is that the death penalty stoops down to the level of the murderer, and such a thing is immoral. Ability to Deter Many people have defended against the death penalty with the point that it deters crime. Before I entered this debate I did extensive research on the death penalty's ability to deter, and I have found overwhelming statistics and statements from professionals that show the death penalty as an ineffective method for deterring crime. Almost 90% of criminologists agree that the death penalty does not deter the crimes it punishes[2]. The main reason for this being that most homicides are committed without forethought--acting out of emotion, or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, preventing their ability to think about the consequences. Anybody who does think ahead about murdering somebody (like a professional hitman) will likely make preparations and plans to evade capture, and would not go ahead with their kill if they did not feel secure in their ability to evade capture. My opponent may bring up some statistical studies that support the idea that the death penalty does deter homicide, but as I said earlier, almost 90% of their colleagues would disagree. As for the why they disagree, I'll just quote an expert's opinion on that: Jeffrey A. Fagan, PhD, Professor of Law and Epidemiology at Columbia University, said in his Feb. 1, 2006 testimony "Deterrence and the Death Penalty: Risk, Uncertainty, and Public Policy Choices" published on the website of the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights: "Recent studies claiming that executions reduce crime... fall apart under close scrutiny. These new studies are fraught with numerous technical and conceptual errors: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider all the relevant factors that drive crime rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, weak to non-existent tests of concurrent effects of incarceration, statistical confounding of murder rates with death sentences, failure to consider the general performance of the criminal justice system... 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... Social scientists have failed to replicate several of these studies, and in some cases have produced contradictory results with the same data, suggesting that the original findings are unstable, unreliable and perhaps inaccurate. This evidence, together with some simple examples and contrasts... suggest that there is little evidence that the death penalty deters crime."[2] So I conclude that the Death Penalty is not cost-effective, immoral, and has failed to satisfactorily prove that it is a deterrent to the crime it punishes. Sources: [1] http://www.deathpenalty.org... [2] http://deathpenalty.procon.org...