Death Penalty

Thank you for your response, brittwaller. A. Contention 1+: Financial Cost My opponent argues that the cost only applies to the American death penalty, and the rights afforded to American criminals. However, if one were to take away this multitude of rights from the accused, the risk factor will shoot up, and even with just a few extra requirements in a capital punishment case, the cost of the trial would still greatly exceed that of a life sentence. "If justice is to be served, and the purpose of the death penalty (or any other punishment) is to see to that, then financial cost is, first and foremost, irrelevant." I would have to disagree. If you decided that you would deal great amounts of pain to a person, and the only purpose of your action is to bring pain, should you break all of his limbs with a rock, or should you buy billions of expensive nanotechnologic robots to attack each and every pain receptor in his body? Obviously, price matters. I would like to ask you directly, brittwaller, would you be willing to spend $10.9 million dollars out of your own money just to have a person that you really don't care about killed instead of imprisoned for life? Voters, what about you? For a fact, because 3% of Californians pay 60% of California's taxes [1], about one million people together spend about six million dollars just to have some guy they don't care about killed. The question is, is that a wise way to spend money? No, it is not wise to spend your own money on something that will not affect anybody's lives in any positive way. That's just a whole bunch of negativity. Now, my opponent says that the death penalty is necessary for liberty. What I would like to know is, why is the death penalty necessary for justice? My opponent's situation about A, B, C, and D is actually false. It assumes it is a given that A murdered B. However, we don't know if A really did murder B. We just know that the evidence points at A murdering B. E, planning for five years, did not leave any concrete evidence for a trial, and instead planted evidence and even had A go missing on the night of the murder, so that everybody think that, without a doubt, A was the murderer. E gets away, and A is killed. Twenty years later, it is discovered that E was guilty, as he writes about it on his deathbed, and everybody looks back and realizes, "Hey, we spent a million dollars to have an innocent man killed, and he'd be alive and ready to leave if we just used our heads, and spared our money and his life." "For A, justice necessarily requires more time if it is to be administered with proper rights afforded to the accused, as in this case justice requires the ending of a life by the state and thus requires closer scrutiny, which naturally takes longer than considerations regarding imprisonment only." Why, then, would the state require the death penalty for justice, if it knows that it would cost more money and only deprive one person of their life, with no benefit towards anybody else? It's an injustice to the taxpayers, that's what it is. Additionally, it uses circular reasoning. It assumes that because the state requires the death penalty, then the death penalty must be achieved, regardless of the cost. That means that if a case bankrupted the nation, we'd still have to go through with it. The smart thing to do would be to remove the non-justified requirement of the death penalty. B. Contention 2+: Risk My opponent assumes that if a person cannot prove their innocence in a long amount of time, then they must be guilty. However, many times, proving one's innocence is impossible. The recent use of DNA evidence would not have been able to save somebody in the 18th century from the death penalty. We will probably discover another method of determining innocence in the near future, and some people will only be proven innocent through that method. That means that innocent people today, without that method, are unable to prove themselves innocent, and therefore die needlessly. Additionally, a proper framing provides the victim with no chance of escape. My opponent claims that because only twelve of the 7,000 in Death Row were exonerated by DNA evidence, the risk is extremely small. However, there are many probably many more on Death Row that would be exonerated by DNA evidence, had DNA evidence been avaliable. And again, many would probably be exonerable by some other method, had that method actually existed today. Furthermore, with the discovery of DNA evidence comes the use of DNA framing. In the end, we can only conclude that we have no clue how many innocent people are on Death Row, but we do know that they've been there, and we do know that some of them have died. My opponent chooses to equate the death penalty with other punishments as "risky. However, the real risk comes from the fact that the death penalty is permanent, while others are not. The risk of permanently killing an innocent man is too much to risk. Is the death of one hundred men worth the death of a thousand guilty? (Remember that these guilty could more easily be imprisoned, and are not currently out on the streets killing others.) Is the death of one man worth the death of a million guilty, when they could all be imprisoned instead? No, the death of an innocent man is not worth seeking justice. C. Hypothetical Situation Let's say, brittwaller, that you're suddenly arrested by the police. You are told that you are on trial for a man found murdered in the woods behind your house. The murder weapon left at the crime scene has your fingerprints all over it, and the man murdered happens to hate you. Everybody knows that there's been a conflict between the two of you. There are footprints from your shoes leading outside towards the murder scene, and back to your house, and your shoes are dirty. Now, you know that you were asleep at the time of the murder. However, you have no way of proving this. Due to the intense evidence used to frame you, you are found guilty of murder. The police call it an open-close case, and stop investigating, and you sit on death row for five years, unable to leave and go to your house to perhaps find the evidence that could liberate you, although the method of proving this evidence to be valid won't be discovered for another century. And so, you are killed by injection. Was your death worth the deaths of any number of criminals? D. Conclusion Analysis "Some criminals deserve such punishment, and justice requires that they get it..." I agree that some deserve the death penalty; however, our method of dealing it is hardly efficient enough. The ends really don't justify the means, especially when the ends already seem dirty. Why should justice require that criminals get the punishment they deserve, when it is so inefficient? "...if the criminal deserves the punishment, it would indeed be unjust to punish them in any other form." However, when we mix the deserving criminals with the undeserving, and are charged with a cost for ever death, it would be unjust to merely discard the innocent lives along with the guilty, moreso than sparing some from what they deserve. "This in itself is reason enough for the death penalty to be used in certain cases." However, we do not know which cases they are, in which case, we shouldn't use it at all. E. Conclusion Many innocents would be killed by the state if the death penalty is used, and the cost is really to high to bother with. Why spend millions to kill the innocent and the guilty? It just doesn't logically make sense. A life sentence keeps them off the street and punishes them just the same. Why go the extra mile when it's just so risky? 1. http://www.sfgate.com...