The United States should abolish the Death Penalty.

Well my first speech may not have convinced you, but hopefully by the end of this debate you changed your mind. In this speech I am going to go through my opponent's arguments in order. Before that, I just wanted to say one thing - throughout my opponent's speech, they bring up this alternative to completely abolishing the death penalty, which is limiting the use for the crimes of mass murder or rapes. This means that whichever plan (abolishing or limiting) has the most benefit and least detriment will win. Now I will go through my opponent's speech paragraph by paragraph. In paragraph 1, my opponent basically concedes to my cost argument, however he also does mention that with limits it will cost less. This may be true, but what my opponent is missing is that no matter the limits on death penalty, it will always be more expensive. Let's say we have 10 murder cases, and LWOP costs $10 per case while DP costs $100 per case. Without limits, all 10 cases would be $100 dollars with LWOP and $1,000 with DP. Now let's say that only one of those cases is a mass murder. LWOP still costs $100 dollars, but DP costs $190 because the regular murder cases get LWOP, and the one mass murder gets DP. No matter the cost of LWOP, DP will always be higher. My opponent also said that my source didn't support the claim that the death penalty caused more crime, but it clearly does. The study done by the Death Penalty Information Center showed that when the DP was in use, there was 28% more crime, meaning the DP causes 28% more crime - and this is not because of what my opponent claims, which is that these places already had peace. This is a ridiculous claim. Many states had extreme crime rates and were suffering heavily, but once they stopped using the death penalty, crime started to slow down. The crime rate stopping has nothing to do with the past, it is directly correlated with the lack of DP use. In paragraph 2, my opponent talks about Russia, and their abolishment of capital punishment not by law, but by practice. This has nothing to do with their arguments, and doesn't prove any point, but if my opponent would like to further explain this in their next speech, he may. My opponent also says in paragraph 2 that "because the very rare one that ends up causing that crime, it would be cost effective to execute the outlier instead of adding to the LWOP list". Now, I have already proven this wrong with my $10 and $100 explanation. Even if there is only a small amount of outliers, it still will always cost more than the punishment of LWOP for all. My opponent concludes paragraph 2 by stating that my Cameron Todd Willingham example doesn't relate to my opponent's speech because with limitations he would have been given the life sentence, however this is not true. My opponent says that with limitations the DP will be used for mass murder. The FBI definition of mass murder is as follows: a number of murders occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders. These events typically involved a single location, where the killer murdered a number of victims..." In Willingham's case, he was charged for killing multiple people (his multiple children), in a single location (their home) which, by the FBI definition, is mass murder. So my Willingham example does stand true, even with limitations, because he would have still been put on the DP for mass murder. In paragraph 3, my opponent talks about the mental state of criminals, which can be so deteriorated that it wouldn't even be safe for them to be in prison, but this is where they are wrong. For mass murder, we wouldn't just be putting these criminals in regular prison, we would put them in much more secure places, like supermax prisons, where they wouldn't be able to have contact with others. Because of this, they wouldn't be able to harm anyone else, so we would not only be sparing this criminal but also making sure nobody else gets hurt. This falls under the criterion of health because we prevent the most death. In paragraph 4, my opponent talks about John Wayne Gacy, who killed 33 young men. Again, as I just said, we would put people like this into supermax prisons, where they wouldn't even be able to have contact with others. My opponent also makes the ridiculous statement that "with your criterion of health, his death would benefit many". How is that? If somebody killed 10 people, and they were killed by DP, that doesn't save the 10 they killed... Death is not something that can be undone.In paragraph 5, my opponent talks about how the government does its job of m anaging resources poorly, and that "the United States Department of Justice should use better accounting for pouring money into the defence of these cases". This is my opponent putting the burden on the government, but in reality the government does its best. The death penalty system itself costs a ludicrous amount of money (as I proved in my first speech), so much that even if the government does all that it can to not waste money, they still will end up doing so. I will not be refuting paragraph 6 as it is more of a summary than anything else. I am enjoying this debate so far and look forward to my opponent's next speech. Good luck!