The Death Penalty Should be Abolished!

Thanks, 9space. Aplogies in advance for any S&G/formatting errors; I had only my phone to write this and did not have time to revise. Since my case overlaps quite a bit with Pro's case, I will be using this round for both rebuttals and counter-rebuttals to avoid redundancy. A1: Justice Pro agrees that the people who commit the most serious crimes deserve the most serious punishments; what we disagree on is what that 'most serious punishment' is. I argued that death is the most serious because it strips a person of the source of their existence-- without life, one cannot experience pleasure, pain, or anything, really. There is no more chance for happiness, no more chance for fulfillment, no more chance for a future; for that, it is the ultimate punishment. There is a reason why the fear of death is and has always been universal across the human race [1]. Pro's alternative, while harsh, simply does not have the same effect as the death penalty does. A person can still find happiness and fulfillment in some form even in jail, especially with the ever-rising standard of living in prisons [2]. If death was really preferable to life in prison, then logically, the vast majority of criminals sentenced to LWOP would commit suicide, yet no where do we see this trend. A2: Costs First of all, cost shouldn't play a role in this debate at all. Justice is about what a person deserves for their crimes; we can't decide what punishment to use by seeing which one is the most cost-effective-- we can only decide based on what they actually deserve, and as I showed in A1, that would be the death penalty. Furthermore, keeping the death penalty legal has its own economic benefits, coming in the form of plea bargaining. We can use the threat of the death penalty to obtain a guilty plea from the criminal early on (in exchange for taking the death penalty off the list of potential sentences), thus completely dodging the costs of the trial process and balancing out the costs of the DP appeals process to the point that there is no substantial difference between the costs of the DP and the costs of LWOP [3]. A3: Innocents Pro argues that the irreversible nature of the death penalty renders the execution of innocents to be a grave injustice. Firstly, such occurrences are now virtually non-existent because modern developments in forensic science such as the advent of DNA testing have allowed for the guilty to be identified as such with greater accuracy than ever before [4]. In fact, Pro's statistics simply support my point by showing that we are capable of distinguishing the innocent from the guilty before it is too late. Pro's claim that innocent executions probably still occur without our noticing is complete speculation; he must provide definitive evidence of such a thing happening relatively recently (e.g. postmortem exonerations). The huge amount of focus given to ensuring the guilt of death row prisoners actually underscores a weakness of imprisonment: without the pressure of imminent death, there is not nearly as much effort put into the the post-conviction exoneration of LWOP subjects, and combined with the overall lower standard of required evidence necessary to imprison someone, there is significantly higher likelihood of there being innocent people spending their lives in prison than there is of an innocent person being executed under the modern justice system. A4: Discrimination Pro's argument, here, is non-unique; it applies to ALL forms of justice because racial discrimination is not just a problem with the death penalty-- it is an underlying problem of society which needs to be fixed independently. Once the actual problem of racial discrimination is solved, the trends that Pro has pointed out will cease to exist. Until then, we will see such trends of racism in all forms of punishment, including normal imprisonment [5]. A5: Death This argument is absurd. One of the death penalty's plus points is that it gets rid of people who the rest of humanity would be better off without. If someone deserves to die, then they should die; the observation that lots of people die is wholly irrelevant. What does Pro even mean by "too many"? He has presented no objective standard by which we can evaluate how much death is too much. A6: Cheap Labor Again, I must assert that justice must take precedence; if someone deserves death, then they should die, regardless of how much material gain we could reap otherwise. But besides that, this form of punishment is entirely unfeasible for the state to administer. It is one thing to seize someone's rights as a matter of justice (i.e. death penalty or imprisonment), but it is something else to take advantage of those people who have had their rights seized to have them do forced labor, reducing them to the status of slaves and stripping them of all dignity. The state simply doesn't have the right to do such a thing; it can only do to its citizens that which justice requires, and extracting cheap labor from them does not fall under that category. A7: Religion Pro's argument is based in a violation of one of America's central political principles: the separation of the church and state. If we were to buy religious arguments for governmental policies, our law books would be completely riddled with contradictions from trying to incorporate the doctrines of all major religious and non-religious groups. We are clearly better off rejecting any such arguments, including this one. Pro ends off by claiming that the majority of people are openly against the death penalty, yet he provides no support for this. In reality, support for the death penalty has always been rather high in the United States [6]. A8: Deterrence Pro's response is entirely insufficient; I acknowledged that in general, the deterrent effect of the death penalty is minimal, but still existent due to the existence of several specific instances in which the death penalty obviously has deterred crime. As I stated before, the statistical correlations cited by Pro regarding deterrence rates are relatively meaningless because of all the other, more important factors that play into crime rates. A9: Recidivism Pro gives virtually no response to this argument. He claims that LWOP offers equal recidivism prevention, a notion which is refuted by my pre-empt regarding in-prison homicide, and then addresses my pre-empt by claiming that prisoner deaths are a good thing. But this contradicts the stance Pro took up in A1-- that death is an "easy way out" for convicts and cheats society of proper justice being served. Pro cannot continue along this line of argumentation without conceding A1 (and by extension, the entire debate). ____________________________________________________ All of Pro's arguments have been refuted. The resolution is negated. [1] http://phobias.about.com... [2] https://www.aclu.org... [3] http://www.sfu.ca... [4] http://america.aljazeera.com... [5] http://www.dailymail.co.uk... [6] http://www.gallup.com...