Death Penalty

Hello Kbug and everybody reading this. Thank you for the opportunity to have this debate and I wish my opponent good luck. The death penalty is probably one of the most serious issues in society. It is never easy to put somebody to death. After all, it should be up to God alone to decide who lives and who dies. My opponent and I can agree on that much. When evil threatens society, however, it is often up to individuals who are imperfect to decide who deserves to die, if anyone. I agree with the quote from John Stuart Mill "arguing that executing a murderer did not display a wanton disregard for life but, rather, proof of its value." Life demands respect and if people go so far as to kill another human being or even more, then they must be abolished from society. In the past ten years, we have been confronting terrorism who are made of people who would like to kill as many people in the world that they can and die doing that act. We all remember September 11, when 3,000 Americans dies because some man in a cave decided that is the way it should be. He ordered his minions to execute as many people as they could. Think about that. How does society respond to that type of evil? Take your common murderer. Perhaps, he is a serial murderer who kills 10 or 20 people. Even at that, how does society respond to that kind evil? Let me paint a picture for the reader of a hypothetical serial killer. The killer likes to track young women between the ages of 17-25. He usually prowls neighborhoods in southern California. At one o'clock in the morning, he breaks into a woman's house and he wakes her up. First, he struggles with her and eventually pulls down her panties and rapes her with maximal penetration. Then, he beats her in the face. Because he is a twisted animal, he grabs the iron from the living room and burns her all over her body. She is still alive at this point. He beats some more in the private area blood is flowing throughout the room by now. That is not enough, he takes out a knife and begins to slash her with a vengeance through the point where her intestines and other organs begin to come out and there are all over the room. He stabs her over 200 times. This horror happened to 15 women over 18 months. Even though this is a hypothetical case, that is not too far fetched from the real world. How does society punish that crime? If you lock him up, the taxpayers are keeping him alive by feeding him and housing him when that food could go to the hungry and the land could go to the homeless or the handicapped. My opponent pretends like these crimes are just bad behavior and they do not deserve to choke to death -- or do they? What do you think the families that are left behind who do not know what to make of it. Their 27 year-old daughter was brutality murdered while the killer lives. What is the justice in that? There have been mistakes in the past, but with DNA evidence now those errors are getting smaller. To house a prisoner for life some estimate to be $5,530,000 while to execute someone cost $1,910,000 [1]. Our justice system is probably the most just in the world to the point of being ridiculous. Killers can appeal for 10 years before actually being executed. If we limit appeals we would drive down the cost of execution even more. So, this is my opening argument. Evil people should not be allowed to live once they are deemed unfit to live a civil. What my opponent arguing even though she cited many facts, she misses the point of the death penalty. She can cite all the academic claims in the world, but it comes down to how do you punish most effectively those who would take innocent lives. This is a philosophical debate more than it is a scientific one. I urge the reader to consider heavily how would they react if somebody they loved was murdered so viciously. I will leave it at that and look forward to my opponents response. _______________ [1] http://www.prodeathpenalty.com...