The Death Penalty should be made illegal in the USA.

I do apologize for missing that round. I had been quite busy for those days, and actually attempted to surmise a response on my lunch break yesterday with 11 minutes remaining on the timer. I finished and submitted it with around 1 minute remaining, but it told me I was too late. At any rate, getting back to the matter... 1. I actually wouldn't disagree that raping a rapist is justified. I wouldn't agree that its a proper punishment however, since it could potentially fail to meet all three qualifications for the purposes of a punishment. The guilty party in question may not care that he or she has been raped (or may very possibly be 'rape-proof' so to speak, in that their goal or wish might be to receive the very sexual act levied against them), it may not deter them consequentially and it wouldn't for any appropriate period of time remove them from society to prevent them from committing the crime again. In fact, the same could be said of all punishments, that no retaliation could either effect them personally in any negative way nor deter them, but in the case of both imprisonment and certainly of execution, we can at least be assured that if anything else, they will be temporarily or permanently removed from society and disabled from continuing to violate other people. I believe that is enough to warrant the general, seemingly 'double-standard' against simply mirroring a crime committed back at the guilty. It's also in many cases not even possible, for example a homeless and possession-less man burglarizing another person's house. On your next objection regarding the three criteria for punishment: All three, I agree, are 'neutralizers' in-so-far as they don't inherently discount or bolster either capital punishment or life-imprisonment. But please recall, the question is whether or not capital punishment should be made illegal, so it would follow that if I theoretically neutralized every single argument between the merits of life imprisonment versus execution, assuming no alternative between them was offered, there would be no reason to actively make capital punishment illegal. If it were currently illegal, and I was arguing that it should be made legal, it would work the other way around. That said, it wasn't my intention there to demonstrate that capital punishment had an advantage to life-imprisonment, it was merely to lay out the grounds for which capital punishment can be considered justified. My arguments for capital punishment *over* life-imprisonment lay elsewhere. 2. The main thing I will offer to you here is a better definition of "shadow of a doubt". I sort of improvised it at it didn't come out as well as it should have, in retrospect. The simpler definition is that "there can be no doubt". Now we could either 1. get into an extremely elaborate debate on the merits of epistemology, for which the remaining character and round limits wouldn't likely even begin to accommodate, or 2, take *both* empirical and rational basis for knowledge as givens, for the sake of practicality. That is, generally things that are perfectly sound in both logic and physical evidence should be considered 'facts'. So beyond a shadow of a doubt implies that for all intents and purposes, a party is found guilty as a matter of undeniable fact, save for the possibility pigs spontaneously grow wings, 2+2 somehow equals 5 and we all awaken from the matrix. 4. I disagree that reform to the justice system, especially a reform reform directly related to the topic, should be 'off-the-table'. Consider that your entire argument is that a purely hypothetical change to the system should be made (making illegal capital punishment.)