Capital Punishment

For this round, I will again address my opponent's contentions and then proceed to my own. Let's begin. My opponent, as a support of his first contention, quotes a statistic that 99.9 percent of all convicted capital murderers and their attorneys argue for life. My opponent proceeds to state that this puts death penalty as the most severe punishment. This statistic, similar to several statistics discussed previously, is from over fifteen years ago, making it clearly out-of-date. Not only that, but the study quoted is extremely biased, stating that "(t)he death penalty debate in the U.S. is dominated by the fraudulent voice of the anti-death penalty movement. The culture of lies and deceit so dominates that movement that many of the falsehoods are now wrongly accepted as fact, by both advocates and opponents of capital punishment." An out-of-date and biased source should not be used in this debate to advance. My opponent proceeds to state that LWOP is cruel and unusual, immoral and unconstitutional, which is purely subjective opinion and again should not be weighed. My opponent's second contention is backed by my opponent in two ways. First, he discussed the National Research council report by stating that seventeen of twenty-four studies claim that the death penalty deters crime. This completely ignores the source I provided. As I provided, the National Research Council reviewed over three decades of research, which includes the studies my opponent states, and found that evidence does not point to this claim. One review in this case does outweigh seventeen studies because the review includes those seventeen studies along with dozens of others and concludes that there isn't enough evidence. My rebuttal still stands. My opponent attacks my second rebuttal of his second contention with an argument of authority, stating that the eighty-eight percent of criminologists is such an argument. Yet, my opponent does that exact same thing with the aforementioned "99.9 of lawyers and murderers argue for life and not death" source. My opponent cannot simply ask the judge to ignore all of the negation's source in favor of his, when he does very similar things. A key flaw in my opponent's source as well is that while it proves correlation, it does not prove causation--in essence, it does not show that the death penalty actually results in the determent of crime. Until evidence surfaces that shows that the death penalty actually deters crime, rather than nothing more than a correlation, this cannot be weighed. Now I will address my own contentions and my opponent's rebuttals. As previously discussed, my opponent's sources are dated from periods as far back as twenty years ago. My opponent has asked that I must prove that the cost calculation is now different, and that the death penalty may have a higher cost, but ultimately that LWOP will cost more over time. Putting aside the notion that, again, this is an assumption based on outdated analysis, it should be noted that in my opponent's own source [1] there is a note which states that the organizers of the page should "present value" all the costs of both a life sentence and death penalty, and that if they do so, a life sentence is actually less expensive than the death penalty. My opponent's largest source to back his financial claims is flawed according to itself. My opponent then proceeds to state that because Scheidegger's study was released in 2009 and that because it is expensive and time consuming to collect raw data, he can use a source that he admits is somewhat dated. Even if the study was released recently and even if it would be cumbersome to research, that does not excuse the fact that the source uses information from twenty-five years ago. My opponent's rebuttals ultimately fail. My societal point is rebutted with again my opponent's claim that the system is at fault and not the punishment. As previously mentioned, this ignores statistics which place specific emphasis on the death penalty, which my opponent brushes over by saying it doesn't matter. My opponent also misunderstands part of a previous statement, where I stated that the idea of the death penalty causes so many executions. I wish to clarify that I meant that the death penalty influences the mindset of the juror to vote one way or the other, which is backed by the emphasis of the death penalty on the statistics. I apologize to my opponent for this misunderstanding. My opponent attempts to rebut my contentions dealing with race by quoting several sources. First, he quotes from Dudley Sharp, a source which finds that the results that I have quoted are the consequences of the system and not actual racism. The article my opponent quotes is again out-of-date, having been written nearly fifteen years ago and quoting studies from over twenty years ago. The source states that it rebuts several sources which claim the opposite, which it actually does not and simply states that the ratios and percentages are off, which are ineffective rebuttals. My opponent's sources which he states shows that people on death row actually have more time to appeal than people with life are again incorrect. He quotes an about.com article which has no citation as to where it gathers evidence and talks about the appeal process in general, and not the appeal process with life in prisoners, and he quotes a Berkeley blog article which in turn depends upon an article from the San Francisco Chronicle which does not quote a single statistic or source of analysis. These sources are flawed, and again my opponent's rebuttals fail. My opponent proceeds to mention that my analogies are flawed for my morality argument. My opponent mentions that there is nothing wrong if we ask the government to punish criminals, which I again agree with. Those who did commit the highest crimes should be punished. But the government is in essence just breaking one of the toys back, which solves for nothing and simply makes the government look exactly like the child. Going into my analogy of Timothy McVeigh, my opponent states that criminals use any excuses to carry out actions and the government has the function of justice. My opponent still places himself under the subjective opinion that the death penalty is the highest form of justice. McVeigh and the government are using the same logic--that in order to stop someone from hitting you, you must hit back--which we must look at as outsiders, not players on the stage. McVeigh is condemned as a murderer, and yet we using the same logic from a different vantage point allow us to view ourselves as justice. We have to view the actions from an outside perspective, and we will see that using the same logic and doing the same actions is ineffective and does not work. My opponent then asks why I stated his last statement was a straw-man fallacy, which I will clarify here. My opponent's analogy is a straw-man as it attacks something that is only superficially similar to the statement I made. I stated that the death penalty was wrong because we are using the same logic and same actions as murderers, which my opponent attempted to rebut by saying that we should no longer punish criminals. This is only superficially similar to my statement, but my opponent still attempted to rebut this, meaning that this is a straw-man and therefore fallacious. I hope I have clarified this statement. I strongly urge a ballot for the negation and Con. Sources: [1] http://www.prodeathpenalty.com...