Resolved: The US Federal Government should significantly reform its Criminal Justice System (Policy)

Although Con has apologized for not knowing the specifics of policy debate, he has continued with his point under mandate 1, which again is totally irrelevant. I will now proceed. Mandate 1. Once again, this argument is completely irrelevant. Imagine if all policy debates consisted of challenging whether Congress will pass or not. It would be a nightmare for Pro. I request that Con drops this misunderstanding. Mandate 2. 1) Why is an officer’s account of an interrogation necessary if there is a video recording? Handwritten notes pertaining to the interrogation are not necessary with this plan. Mandate 3. 1) Exactly. As I said, this exception is a safeguard. I would also like to note that Con is supposed to support the status quo, he cannot propose a different way of doing things. In Policy debate, Con defends what the current system does, not what it should do. Thus Con cannot ask for more “safeguards”, because the status quo doesn’t even recording interrogations in the first place. 2) I fail to see Con’s point here. How is this a reason to vote against me? Funding I have provided my math showing you can do some estimation, although inaccurate.1. Is Con blind or what? My link was the evidence. Go back to my speech and you will see I cited evidence from the supreme court special committee saying each room costs at the most 7,500 dollars. In response to his evidence, 30,000 dollars was not per session, it was in one department. Note that a department can have more than one interrogation room.2. I agree. Interrogation rooms are used more than 10 times per year. This is why there are most likely less interrogation rooms than my estimate states, and this is why my estimate is a maximum estimate. Please note that I’m not trying to count the cost that this will take until the end of the world, I’m just calculating the front end expense. Con conceded to my MAIN link as to why my estimate is good. 3. Con continues to ignore my evidence. I provided evidence that there are 175,000 people each year. Yes, it will change from year to year, but not drastically. 4. Continuing to ignore the math. Con agrees that each interrogation room is used more than 10 times per year. I’ve provided PROOF that there are 175,000 people per year interrogated (see my evidence in that round). Thus if you divide 175,000 people by 10, (in other words each interrogation room covers 10 people), you get 17,500 interrogation rooms. Let’s say each room is used 20 times a year. Then divide 175,000 by 20 and you get 8,750. Even less. As you can see, the price can only be lower than my estimate, given that Con AND Pro agree interrogation rooms are used more than 10 times a year and that I have provided evidence for the rest (which Con has ignored). Lastly, I’d like to mention interrogation rooms are not in every agency. In fact, here in Washington the department of homeland security has no interrogation room so they have to go to a different agency to interrogate suspects. Just a thought to munch on. 5. Once again I’ve proved everything with either logic that Con has agreed to, or evidence that Con has ignored. Excuse me, I meant federal agencies will choose. I accidentally use the words police departments sometimes. To clarify this point, each federal agency, such as FBI, will choose the equipment for their own interrogation rooms. They all individually choose. This point doesn’t even matter. Advantage 1. Con is acting like federal agents are always trying to be abusive. Fact: There are some bad apples. We can’t always deal with every single situation. How do I know there’s a deterrence factor? Con keeps on bringing up points which are exceedingly nit picky. Logically, a federal agent knows what he is not allowed to do. If there is a camera recording, of course there’s a deterrence factor. You think he’ll abuse the suspect on film? Logically, NO. It’s all on film, the defense/prosecutors can easily review and see if the suspect was tricked or not. Once again, Con continues to provide no evidence for his points and is using exceedingly nit picky arguments. Advantage 2. Con’s sources are indeed credible to the point of how much they know. Just because someone is credible doesn’t mean he knows how many false confessions there are in the system. Once again, no police department or University or think tank or professor or genius can know how many false confessions there are total. This is something that can’t be quantified, evidence or not. “Furthermore, your source says three things AND false confessions…” I don’t get what Con is trying to say here. My source is saying that to more accurately assess coercion, to know if the suspect knew the facts of the crime, and to see if he confessed falsely, we need to record interrogations. I ask Con to clarify this. Advantage 3 And 6. Yes there will be disputes. But they can easily be slapped aside by playing the part of the interrogation that proves them wrong. For example, a dispute about Miranda rights could be easily thrown aside by playing the first part of the interrogation. The amount of time it takes to argue over a simple thing like Miranda rights if there’s no proof on either side completely outweighs the amount of time it takes to simply replay a recording. It can take days to argue, while playing the recording takes minutes. I don’t want to continue arguing this point because I would like to point out I have evidence from a credible source who says disputes are lower. The person in my evidence knows a lot more about recording than either Pro or Con does, let’s listen to the evidence please. Advantage 4. First, state police and federal agents are very different, yes. But their interrogation rooms are not. The cost is the same, you pop a camera into the room and maybe build a central control room, doesn’t matter whether the people doing it are federal or state. Second, a recording only has to be reviewed if it’s going to be used as evidence in court. As Con agrees, suspects don’t always confess, so evidence from interrogations is not frequent. Also you have to remember what the alternative to reviewing a recording is: writing a whole report on how it went. Let’s take this 24 hour interrogation example Con likes to use. Imagine waking up the next morning after conducting an interrogation, looking at your notes, and having to write exactly what happened during the interrogation. Good luck. That will take even longer than simply watching the relevant part of the video in which the confession happened. Lastly, defendants claim all kinds of things. There are tons of cases online, just look it up. Once again no evidence of any kind proving Con’s points. Advantage 5. Okay? Apparently Con is now an expert in interrogations and knows exactly everything that happens. Forgive the sarcasm, but I actually found this humorous because it was completely irrelevant. Once again I have evidence, Con doesn’t. Significance Con conceded significance and tied this back to money saved. The fact is, Thomas P. Sullivan, my main evidence source, did a survey of 600 police departments (state level) who record interrogations. It saved them money in the end. Con can speculate all he wants but the empirical evidence is on my side. Conclusion: Once again Con is misunderstanding fiat power. It’s there so we don’t have to have an ugly argument about Congress every single debate round. It would be a mess. Ask any policy debater whether passing things through Congress with fiat power is possible, and they will say yes. Con’s argumentation can be summed up as: nit picky without evidence. He has provided flawed logic based on assumptions and has not provided much evidence to back himself up. I have used 12 pieces of evidence (plus the definitions), while Con has used 5. I would like to clarify that in the last round the evidence that said (3) is supreme court special committee, there are two separate links on (2) since it was messed up.