Resolved: The United States of America should abolish the death penalty

Once again, done completely with my iPhone. Please excuse format and choppiness Morals Pro"s "moral argument" is that if a single innocent life is lost as a result of this policy, itshould be eliminated. After his section on morality he concludes by stating; "Ask yourself how many innocent Americans the government should be allowed to kill. If the answer is 0, then there is no logical position to support other than the full abolition of the death penalty." He wants to discuss practicality of policies, but acts as if no policies should result in the loss of innocent life. To see the absurdity of this, try applying that statement to other policies. Seatbelts cause conservatively estimating 100 deaths per year, by trapping people submerged in water or whose cars exploded. http://www.politifact.com...-/ Some of those people undoubtedly wore seatbelts merely because it was the law, meaning the policy kills 100 people per year. To put what we are debating in perspective, pro is arguing against something that causes 20 deaths per year, if we assume 2% are innocent (not all people exonerated are innocent, many may be exonerated due to evidence being withheld that "may" have swayed a jury), than we are talking about 1 innocent life lost every 4 or 5 years because of this policy. Yet seat belts save several thousand lives per year, and could save more if there was higher compliance. When we judge the merits of a law based on how many innocent lives are lost, we need to weigh that against how many innocent lives are saved. If you buy my utilitarian argument from last round, you only need to look at how many people the law makes happy, and given a 67% [1]support of the death penalty from the general population, we can see keeping the death penalty legal would cause more happiness from that point alone. However if you don"t buy my utilitarian argument than by the end of this round you will still agree that the death penalty still saves more lives innocent or not, than it takes. If I can prove it saves more lives than is costs than I hands down win the moral argument and the debate, and that is even on the off chance the rest of my arguments fail. Deterrence My opponent starts off his deterrence section by not knowing how to properly use and utilize statistics. Saying that "88%" of criminologists say the death penalty is not a deterrent. However if you actually read things in detail, you can see this is misleading.[3] These criminologists were asked to set opinions aside and look at what the empirical data suggests. If asked instead does the empirical evidence support that the death penalty is definitely not a deterrent, you may have gotten a similarly high number. The reason for this is because the scientific consensus up until 2012 was represented in the a national research council study: "The committee concludes that re- search to date is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates. [4] However this doesn"t address some of the lesser known studies done on this subject as well as studies conducted after 2012. Studies I"ll mention. Pro goes on to argue that because murder rates and crime rates are lower in non death penalty states that it must mean the death penalty has no deterrent effect. This is untrue. Maybe rednecks in the red states most likely to implement the death penalty are just more prone to fly off the handle, or maybe people in low crime areas feel safe so they feel like they can be more merciful to criminals. The states that have higher murder rates also tend to lead the nation in domestic violence as well, and it"s possible wife beaters are more inclined to support the death penalty. All that speculation is beyond the scope of this debate. There are two types of deterrence we need to look at. The first was mentioned in the prior round. If we removed most or all of the people doing life without parole we could eliminate their contribution to the problem with inmates murdering each other. To state the obvious, if these people aren"t around to kill other inmates, they can"t kill other inmates. If you remember in the previous round I stated that we could prevent up to 5 of these killings a year by making the death penalty more common and happen at a faster rate. The first type of deterrence is removing murderers from existence so they are rendered physically incapable of murdering. The second type of deterrence is preventing people from murdering to start with. If there were some periods of time in states where the death penalty was used and then not used and then used again, could we hope to compare the murder rates before and during and after these periods to see correlation. Hold on, there was a time when this occurred. There was a moratorium set on murders by the Supreme Court several years ago where we observed an increase in murders in death penalty areas, followed by a decrease in murders once the moratorium went away. We also have periods of time where the death penalty was more common than other times, where we can study the effects of increasing and decreasing the number of murderers killed. Below is an excerpt from a previous debate I done on the topic excluding citations which can be found in that debate. [5] Studies have been done to show that as many as 18 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 analysis was done and showed that there was less than a 1 in 18,000 chance that the correlation was 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 number of death penalty states where it seems that deterrence isn't working but A recent study offers more refined findings. "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. 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 . If you reject the death penalty then you do it at the cost of several innocent people." I addressed costs in opening arguments, which serve as rebuttals, so all counter rebuttals and conclusion will be saved until next round. [1] https://www.heritage.org... [2] https://www.stanfordlawreview.org... [3] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org... [4] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org... [5] http://www.debate.org...