Capital Punishment

I would like to apologize to my opponent for my abandoning the previous round. I lost track of time and ended up accidentally forfeiting. It was a honest mistake, and won't happen again. I hope my opponent can accept this and we can continue as normal. First, I will address my opponent's contentions and then return to my own. My opponent's contentions are as followed: a.) that the death penalty is "just" and b.) that the death penalty helps deter crime. I will address these contentions in this order. Rebuttal to "The death penalty is just" I object in several ways to my opponent's contention here. My opponent mentions that punishment should be distributed based on the level of the crime--this, the negation does not object to. The notion, however, that the death penalty is the ultimate penalty is objectionable. Let's examine the death penalty closely. The death penalty involves a prisoner waiting a number of years on death row, only to face a painless, quick death. Life in prison without parole, however, involves spending the rest of your life behind bars, with no chance of leaving. And yet my opponent states that the former is the more severe punishment? This seems rather odd. My opponent is also under the assumption that all prisoners get to have a massive amount of amenities, which is nothing more than a myth [1]. If my opponent truly wants justice to be served, then life in prison without parole should be implemented, rather than the death penalty. Rebuttal to "The death penalty deters crime" This is a heavily debated claim, which can serve as the topic for a whole other debate. At minimum, the information is inconclusive, and at maximum, this claim is wrong. The National Research Council of the National Academies found in a review [2] of more than three decades of research that the evidence to date for whether or not the death penalty deters crime is inconclusive, with the committee deciding that such studies should not be quoted in discussions about the effectiveness of the death penalty on homicide levels. According to another study [3] published by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, eighty-eight percent of the nation's leading criminologists believe that the death penalty does not deter crime, with seventy-five percent of respondents agreeing that debates on the death penalty distract legislators from dealing with real problems on crime. Examination [4] of the United States Census over several years has found that states without the death penalty have actually lower rates of homicide than states with the penalty, with some years having a difference of over forty percent in homicide rates. Clearly, the claim that the death penalty deters the crime is inaccurate, or at minimum cannot be weighed in this debate. I will now address my own contentions. My opponent's rebuttals to my first contention are unsatisfactory. The first quote my opponent cites is out of date, with the annual rates cited from a Time magazine article from 1994. It is illogical to weigh such a statistic from a date that is nearly twenty years ago, and this should not be weighed in the round. The second quote my opponent cites from is even more out of date, as the author hinges his research on a source from 1993 which featured statistics from 1988. To try and use statistics from 1988 in a debate in 2013 is simply illogical! You cannot look to this when it comes time to judge. My opponent's rebuttals to my second contention ignore a number of items addressed. It ignores the United States General Accounting Office source, which quotes that in eighty-two percent of the studies reviewed, the race of the victim influenced the final verdict. It also ignores the statistic which states that black defendants who kill whites are sentenced to death thirteen times higher than those with white defendants and black victims. My opponent then goes on to state that the system should be fixed, and not the punishment. Again, this ignores the statistics quoted, which places an emphasis on the death penalty and not the court of law. It is the idea of the death penalty that results in such a high ratio of those executed. My opponent's act of ignoring the majority of the statistics cited makes his rebuttal unsatisfactory. My opponent follows with rebuttals to my mental illness and disability sub-point, mentioning that the mentally ill should not be punished whatsoever. But again, this ignores the statistics which place an emphasis on the death penalty, rather than the system of law as a whole. The fact that over three-dozen states allow for mentally ill people to be executed--which, according to my opponent, is the highest punishment in the land--should be condemned by both my opponent and myself. But we also must address this from a practical matter. In a court of law, should the mental illness of a criminal not be addressed, under my opponent's world, there would be a slimmer chance for possible appeal, and a higher chance that the criminal could die before being exonerated. Under the negation's world, however, with life in prison, the criminal has a higher chance of being exonerated because he has more time for proper appeals. My opponent's rebuttals to my third contention are that it is hard to understand, which I will take the time now to clarify. I would like to apologize to my opponent for not being unclear in places--hopefully I can clarify my points here. I used the "We are taught at a young age" part as a lead-in to my main point, that it is irrational to justify the death penalty on a moral level and that is bizarre to teach our children this logic and then go against it in such a way. I was not referring to the punishment system as a whole--simply that we are taught as kids that if someone breaks a toy, we should not break one of their toys back, which is analogous to the death penalty. I used Timothy McVeigh for the sake of an analogy--that he justified the bombing of the Murrah building as justice, to deter the government from committing more crimes against the populace--an argument that my opponent himself used as a major contention. By executing criminals under the premise of justice and to deter crime, we are in fact using the same logic that McVeigh used. Yet, we condemn McVeigh and praise ourselves under the veil of justice. This is hypocrisy. My opponent then proceeds to attack a straw-man with his last two questions, which is fallacious and should not be weighed in this round. My opponent's rebuttal here is unsatisfactory. In conclusion, my opponent's rebuttals are unsatisfactory and do not properly address the contentions I have raised previously. My opponent's contentions are also unsatisfactory, basing themselves off of inaccurate data and a common myth about prisoner treatment. I strongly urge a ballot in negation of the resolution from the judge. Thank you. Sources: [1] http://www.corrections.com... [2] http://www.nap.edu... [3] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... [4] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...