The prohibition of the death penalty.

==Con Case== C1: Retributivism (Kant) Kant argues that a legal system is established in order to set the wrongs to rights in a society. The government is the protector of the common good and must insure that the individual wronged in a criminal case is adequately and proportionally punished. We can deduce that criminals deserve proportional punishment based on an analysis of the universalization maxim – when a criminal steals he essentially destroys the very concept of property and when a criminal murders he destroys the very concept of the importance of life. Even from a non-Kantian point of view, this makes sense because the criminals’ very actions show disregard for sacredness of rights and the law established in the U.S. As such, the legal system has an ethical responsibility to ensure that criminals are not given unequal benefits in society, i.e. when a criminal kills another and is not proportionally punished then this criminal in essence has more rights than the victim. [1] ==Pro Case== C1: Irreversible Mistakes Group all his sub-points (they are functionally the same) My first response is that in today’s modern society the chance of killing an innocent is negligible at best. Due to technological advances in criminal forensics, it is possible to have 99% accurate DNA testing. This makes exoneration of the proposed guilty very effective while on Death Row. Death Row is as long as it is because mistakes are trying to be mitigated as much as possible. The ACLU writes "In the U.S., as of June 2002, 108 people including 12 death row inmates, have been exonerated by use of DNA tests. The increasing use of DNA testing to help confirm the innocence or guilt in capital cases is one among many reforms that will help ensure that innocent people are not sentenced to death." [2] My second response is that his arguments are mostly speculation. In terms of the amount of people that could potentially be killed, he leaves it up to the readers of this debate to infer that since X amount of people were saved, then mostly all the people on death row were innocent. Note: Do no default to an innocent position after all the testing has been done. After pretrial and post-trial DNA testing, countless appeals trials, new evidence, etc. those people were still seen as guilty. My third response is a TURN: Death penalty prevents murderous recidivism. According to the BoJ, 1.2% of murderous felons released from prison committed murder again – some accounts of multiple murders per felon. This means that by abolishing the death penalty there will be more murders of more innocent people in my opponent’s theoretical world. [3] AND life without parole does not solve the recidivism issue – in-house homicides occur against other inmates. According to the BoJ from the years 2001-2002 87 prisoners were killed from direct homicides, not including possible cover-ups “accidental deaths”, manslaughter, and attempted murder. [4] My fourth response is a TURN: Death penalty deters. According to a study at Emory University, the death penalty deters an average of 18 murders and the moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois lead to an additional 150 murders. [5] C2: Cost My first response is that there is no weighing mechanism in this point. Who cares? My opponent is essentially saying that since it costs a lot then we need to sacrifice our ethical responsibility for the sake of saving. I argue our overall ethical obligation to ensure justice outweighs because money is simply a means towards an end, and if a state wants to legitimately protect its interests with the use of the death penalty, it is in their right to do so. My second response is that my opponent tries to say if we ban the death penalty than we will save our police officers. There is no evidence to support this claim. We are in a period of austerity where cuts need to be made, but the resolution is a carte blanche prohibition of the death penalty in all states. My third response is that the release of criminals was (1) not a direct result of the death penalty. My opponent needs to prove that it is because of the death penalty this release was made, but (2) he makes it out worse than it is – most criminals released were marijuana offenders who probably shouldn’t have been jailed to such an extent anyway (but that’s a different debate). C3:Weak Form of Justice There are literally no warrants here, except my opponents own opinion. However, cross-apply the Kant analysis in that this is the only pure form of justice because we are giving the criminal what he has made into a universal law. But moreover, justice could never be served if the criminal is given the right to life over his/her victim. The scale would be tilted in favor of the criminal. C4: Unalienable Rights My first response is a TURN: that if we use my opponents analysis all types of punishment would be void, for example the jail system because jail is an inherent violation of ones right to liberty which is an unalienable right. If this is true than my opponent will lose the calculus debate right off the bat since his world has no punishment what so ever. My second response is a TURN: The Declaration is based on the political philosophy of John Locke. Locke was a supporter of the death penalty because people that killed removed themselves entirely from the social contract, which strips them of their protection under the law. Moreover, Locke believed death penalty was necessary in order to sustain a social contract based highly on respect for rights and avoiding the violation of those rights. [1] http://stairs.umd.edu... [2] https://www.aclu.org... [3] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov... [4] Bueaeur of Justice Statistic. Suicide and Homicide Rates in State and Local Prisons [5] http://www.cbsnews.com...