Resolved: The United States Should Abolish the Death Penalty

I'm not going to go into this much, but limiting the scope of the DP to whatever my adversary sees fit is not logical nor is it practical. He can't just say the DP is used for only murders when in reality the court decides what and when it is used. This is an argument about the status quo, and per the status the quo that is how it is defined. True I can't change the definitions , but not defining heinous and then saying in the same paragraph that the DP is determined by a court of law is counter intuitive, it's also just plain silly. Had he wanted to define this a certain way , he should have read Roys round before he copied it because from any logical standard we can see that is what this debate is about. I'm going to go over the impacts of this debateR1) Deterrence. My adversary tries to limit the consensus I mentioned down to a set group. This is the equivalent of taking a poll about how many scientist believe the earth is 6,000 years old, and then saying that *only* Christian scientist are right. What he is attempting to do is skew data and numbers in order to target a set group of *experts* that agree with his only his opinion. If you discount the opinion of a vast majority that all tend to think the same way , and then only ask the people that agree with the opposing mindset anyone can come up with any number they want. For the most part he is not able to answer my main point of this argument which is crimes aren't rational. He states some crimes are rational, but has spent most of his opening round arguing this is a debate about murders. Murders are not rational. Besides blinding asserting that murders are rational, and providing a study that shows you can *deter* crime (not murders), he has yet to hit the heart of this contention. When you are in the moment, and you are ready to kill, you are not going to think about consequences. No one who is about to pull a trigger or kill someone is going to think "hey if I do this I may get in trouble". All of these studies he cites are around deterring crime. This includes population, area, control rates, etc. None of that is soluble as it misses the point. You can't get data on how deterrence works in cases where someone is ready and willing to kill. The target area is to inconclusive.The sources I cited show this. When someone get's mad, adrenaline get's pumping, and when that happens anger comes out. There are certain events that trigger this process, and when that process is trigger adrenaline is at it's highest. Your heart rate goes up, your blood flow spikes, you start to sweat, and then after that most people tend to respond with psychical aggression [1]. When that trigger even is severe enough to spike this to a monumental level, the rational is gone and you are left with a physical and aggressive response to the event that triggered it. This is where most murders happen, in the head of the moment. Con can cite studies all day long saying having a DP deters crime, but it will never be conclusive. Most of his studies try to encompass crime rates from one year to the next, crimes in certain places after the DP was active or was not active, but it does not evaluate the one thing that actually matters, what causes people to kill. Once you hit a stage where you are ready to kill, it's completely subjective to the situation at hand and the trigger event that causes it. This is a day by day thing, and no study will ever be able to accurately portray events that happen like this. I also affirm that if his primary motive is to deter crime, that we use the funds that could be saved from abolishing the DP to invest in officers that could reduce crime greater than the DP itself. As my source and his source both notes, police are the best method for reducing crime, so if we can offset costs and put this into a more viable deterrence method, we should opt to do that. This kills the need for this at all R2) JusticeThis point is entirely dropped and not even addressed really. As I stated when he is arguing that someone *ought* to be killed in order to bring justice to the family, and then in turns argues that they can plea bargain out to reduce costs, he is undermining his own argument. By his own logic people that commit heinous crimes (murder according to him) should be put to death. Opting to let every person that commit murder off with a plea bargain undermines his retributive point of justice, as he would have to affirm that all people that kill without cause should be put to death. This is dropped for him to try and counter my cost argument and this rebuttal was never even brought up after I said it 2 or 3 times. He also argues that the eye or an eye can be unconstitutional but that misses the point. Whether or whether not a certain action is or is not constitutional does not address the motive for why that action is being done. What if raping was legal. Is it moral to rape a rapist? That is the logic that is being used and which he is affirming under the constitution. Meaning just because the DP is legal , it's alright to kill people that kill but anything that falls out of that criteria is invalid. This ignores the logic and rational behind why you are killing the people to begin with. It's literally retributive justice, which is an invalid perspectiveso 1) This is gone because he opts to use ple bargaining and undermines his own argument2) You don't need retributive justice to serve justice. He says plea bargaining fits into his frame work because it brings about a certain type of justice, but earlier in the round he was saying executing people was the way to bring closure to families. You can't say retribution is the way to bring closure and serve justice, then argue it's situational. The entire point of the DP is to bring justice according to my adversary. Allowing people to plea bargain out in order to save money, literally shoots this argument down by itself. C1) CostsHe source spammed this so much that I can't read through it all if I wanted due to time restraints. I'm just going to except his conclusion because it's a concession as is. He notes and affirms that the *best case scenario* for the death penalty is that it is 30 percent more costly than abolishing it. That is also the best case scenario, from an logical standpoint that number is not going to be accurate, and if I had the time I'm sure I could show where it would be near 50 percent. I'll take 30 percent though. Even from his own logic, a capital trial at the best case scenario will be around 500 thousand to 1 million dollars more expensive[2]. I mean this is not considering that states need nearly 400 million dollars to re do death rows [2]. If you consider that you are saving 500k to 1 million dollars per capital trial, saying that you could not re invest that back into police enforcement is not logical. This is not supported, but just an assertion. A police officers salary is around 30-60k[3]. So think of it this way for every capital trial that is not done, we can hire around 10-20 police officers. Police is the best way to reduce crime and his own source notates this, the only rebuttal he is has offered is that it won't contribute. I think 10-20 polices officers per trial we don't have could impact quite a bit. That would reduce crimes rates nearly 1.5 what the DP does alone[4]. This flips his deterrence argument. C2) ExtraditionNote I did not drop this, he basically conceded it with a blind assertion This was basically dropped with con making an argument that we could make a law to encompass this. That is not practical or logical, nor has it been done. Again this is con just asserting something without showing how it would work. This relies completely on how other countries perceive us, and what we would do. Removing the DP guarantees extradition while his method is an idea he came up with that is not in practice or promised to workC3) InnocentAgain he just drops the point of this argument. Claiming that just those 10 people *could* be guilty does not show that. Nor is there anyway to know this. The FBI planted evidence so the gauge by which they are innocent is already altered. Again this is just the 20 we have seen, if it happened here think about how many more times this has happened. This is literally a thorn in the side of justice. Add this with the wrongful executions, and the fact that the FBI is determining who is guilty this is a monumental impact. Con just says *could* be guilty, but again this is a non factor. The gauge by which the are innocent was altered and evidence was faked. You are opening this up to the whim of the FBI C4) SuppliesAgain con jsut drops this. He asserts that a certain method is humane1) He does now show how this will be used on a large scale2) He ignores the supreme court is ruling almost all other methods outside of injection inhumane3) He just asserts his own ideology without considering anything elseThe supreme court decides what is viable and what is not, not my adversary sadly. So if they are ruling methods outside of injection as inhumane that is a huge issue. C5) CILCon again misses the entire point. Having a DP where we can execute people, gives other the countries the right to execute people without giving us due cause to challenge them. What they execute people for is up to interpretation, because they can interpretae it in non humane ways. Saying that Killing anyone at all is not humane is far easier than trying to define what humane is, as what the DP is used for is entirely relevant to their laws. If you ban the DP all together, it solves that problem. Whether we condemn them or not is not a factor, it's whether we can challenge them on non humane methods of execution and actually save lives. [1] http://tinyurl.com...[2] http://tinyurl.com...[3] http://www1.salary.com...[4] http://tinyurl.com...