The death penalty should exist

Thank you for a great debate, Lannan. In this round, all I will be doing is refuting your round one case. Contention I. DeterrenceLannan starts off his argument with a graph that has shown that was compiled from data from the mid-1970's to the end of the 90's. I honestly am not sure what this graph is meant to be saying when it says "adjusted murder rates". Is this supposed to mean the absolute murder rate (which shows that non-capital punishment states have lower murder rates) or some unnecessary convoluted formula that is never actually shown to the viewer? What this graph above shows is that there is actually a lower murder rate (from 1990-2010) in non-death penalty states than in death penalty states [1]. From this data, we can actually see that the average murder rate is 4 per 100,000 in non-death penalty states and about 5 per 100,000 in death penalty states. This means that, according to my opponent's logic, the death penalty is actually a causal link for more murder, and this completely voids his argument. His source that displays his graph is also voided due to it not being recent; a more recent study has found something contradictory to old studies and thus we should side with new evidence. Rejecting the new evidence is akin to using studies from the year 1776 saying that England might beat the USA over 2015 evidence that says otherwise. My opponent goes on to say "we can all agree that Criminals are rational actors as we can see that they the plan and preform their crimes by weighing the costs and benefits", however I ask him this: does a person who goes into a drunken rage weigh the costs and benefits of murdering their cheating ex? Do those that are panicking while committing a capital crime think rationally while committing the crime? Of course not, they are not in the best state of mind. It is not logical to say that murderers think best while committing their crimes, because they are in a state of adrenaline and trying to get the job done quickly (not necessarily correctly).My opponent claims that because teenagers, who are less rational than adults, have been found to have crime rates that are lower than adults. While this may be true, it is a grand claim to think that this is readily comparable to a killer that acted on spontaneity. I would assume that they have lower crimes rates due to not readily having access to things that can impair their judgment severely, either legally or illegally - things such as alcohol or illegal drugs. This, as well as they are less able to manage their time easily enough to commit such crimes - it is a well-known fact that teenagers do not have the best time management, and this means they cannot commit crimes.My opponent still claims that there is evidence that claims that the death penalty saves lives later in his argument, citing the Heritage Foundation. Let us look at their claim of "death row removals appear to increase the incidence of murder". This is a really grand claim to make in this kind of context, where it is literally saying that removing someone that was wrongfully accused of murder will increase murder. This source is saying that we shouldn't remove anyone from the death penalty if they did not deserve it (for not committing a crime) because there would be more murders. As a society that is based around justice, this is an absurd claim. Everyone should have equal protections of the law, and when the law fails us we should be allowed to use it to our advantage (getting out of the death penalty when it is not deserved).Contention II. Innocents.My opponent is correct in saying that there is a 0.28% error in killing innocent people, however he doesn't understand that there is still a large amount of people that are sentenced to the death penalty that do not receive it. There is a 4.1% error rate while convicting people to death, later to exonerate them [2]. This would mean that if we did not catch our mistakes, that there would be a 4.1% error rate in executions, and we are really lucky that we are able to catch the mistakes that we have made, and it usually takes many many appeals, such as in the case of Ray Krone [3], the 100th person to be exonerated of the death penalty when he did not deserve it.What we are effectively doing is sentencing people to die without knowing if they are actually guilty (innocent until proven guilty, as the saying goes) and hoping that later we fix our mistakes. This is absurd, we should not be sentencing people to die and wasting parts of their lives just because we feel like giving them retribution.Contention III. Crowded prisonsMy opponent is making a HUGE slippery slope fallacy in this argument. He is saying that because overcrowding is bad, we should execute prisoners (even if we don't know if they are guilty). The actual amount of prisoners on death row in 2015 is around 3019 [4], and the total prisoner population is around 2,266,800 [5]. If we executed every single prisoner on death row right now, the entire prisoner population would decrease by just 0.1%. This would mean that there is actually a negligible amount of prisoners that would be leaving the prison system to actually make a significant impact, and a large enough impact to warrant a change.What my opponent is advocating for is for more prisoners to be wrongly executed just so that prisons can be less filled, instead of doing the easier approach of perhaps decriminalizing drug offenses, which would decrease the load on the penal system by a staggering 20% [5]. Contention IV. CostMy opponent claims that the average cost for a prisoner is $160,000 annually for the entire US penal system, yet the source that backs up this claim only says that this is the cost for New York City, not the US. According to the Federal Register, a government website, the annual federal cost for an inmate was a low $26,163 [6], and the annual cost for California was around $45,000 [7].If we use the cost of California, which as I stated earlier is a whopping $300 million per prisoner, and their own annual cost of just $45,000, we can find the disparity of these numbers to be huge. If we assume that a prisoner will live for 50 years in a prison (45,000 x 50), we get the total cost to be around $2.25 million, which is lower than 1% of the cost for the death penalty.This entire contention of my opponent is voided due to using the cost of a single city where it is an outlier, and that it is just untrue when you apply it to the entire US, and when we look at the facts this contention actually builds onto my case.[1]. http://www.amnestyusa.org...[2]. http://www.pnas.org...[3]. https://en.wikipedia.org...[4]. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...[5]. https://en.wikipedia.org...[6]. https://www.federalregister.gov...[7]. http://www.mountain-news.com...