The Death Penalty

Apologies for all the delays. I'm going to spend this round simply defending and refuting, nothing new. Now my opponent is trying to nail this debate to real life. This debate was never about the death penalty in practice. This is not about how the death penalty IS working. It's about whether or not it should be in place. Look at my definition, "that the Death penalty is a morally acceptable punishment to the very worst crimes", I made it clear that this was at a philosophical level. Now, my opponent has given the hypothetical example of a man who kills one person to save a thousand. For that we have legal provisions such as justifiable homicide. That is not an offence. It is a bizarre tragedy but not a murder by any conventional definition. Morality has evolved over the years. There is a general human understanding of right and wrong. We call this the legal system. Those offences which are considered particularly abhorrent by this moral system and are universally condemned are, by this resolution, to be punished by death. Not all legal codes are the same, of course, but in broad terms, they all have the same guiding sense of right and wrong. Murder is always punished harshly. Rape is always punished harshly. Dealing hard drugs is always punished harshly. There may be exceptions to these but they are negligible. With regards to those with mental inhibitions, my analogy is imperfect. Of course they are not to be treated the same way as a dog, but in many respects, they are afforded the same rights and roughly equal responsibilities. We make sentimental allowances because of course, they are human. What determines how humans should act is the legal system. Imprisonment is not equal to the penalty of death. In prison, one gets 3 meals a day, is exercised regularly, and has visitors. Certain individuals even thrive in prison. Death is equal to death. Nothing more and nothing less than the offence. Again, I would point my opponent to the legal system. Over the years humanity has developed a working moral code that we all more or less share. Legal systems the world over share many qualities and these are the fundamental ones. I am not assuming every criminal will reoffend, but certain crimes happen to have a high rate of reoffence. Rape, for example, is notorious for this. Certain crimes fall into this bracket. There are people who commit murder as a crime of passion. However, I am of the view that anyone who is such a slave to their emotions can be done without in a civilized society. That is your opinion, but in cases where we have someone who has gone off the handle and, due to emotional instability has, for example, taken a life, there is no justification to keep them alive. Furthermore, in organized crime, perpetrators have often chosen crime as a career path. They will return to it once let free. There are plenty of statistics I could quote at you if you demand them, but I think common sense is more effective. If someone has been a gangland criminal all their life, made all of their wealth by unlawful means and has lived outside the law for years, then jailing is not a deterrent, it is an occupational hazard. That is why time and time again we see gun-runners, drug-smugglers and the rest of that ilk reoffend. We know it happens, we see it in society. Your conjecture is more unlikely, that we can take these people and force them into epiphany. It hinges on the idea that people are basically morally responsible, and you have no model for how we should rehabilitate a career criminal. You simply say we should. What it comes down to is that it's better to be safe than sorry. We can keep these people and then loose them on society again, and they might do nothing, but then again, they are more likely to go back to crime.