The Death Penalty should be legal in the United States

Thank you, Roy, for your response. 1-. The death penalty is extremely expensive to implement My opponent claims that "citizens think justice makes it worthwhile to prosecute serious crimes despite the cost." I disagree. There is definitely a point at which delivering more justice to a criminal costs more than it helps; I don't even see how killing helps. We could easily spend twice as much money on our police force, reducing the number of criminals who get away with their crimes slightly, but this would result in numerous policemen doing nothing, a waste. The law of diminishing returns applies to justice. 1. The court costs properly associated with extra scrutiny My opponent's statistic regarding this point seems irrelevant; the 6% applied to the Innocence Project, but depending on how many cases they investigated, 6% may be a drop in the bucket or a large portion of all death penalty cases. Life without parole, while requiring scrutiny, would not require as much scrutiny as a death penalty case, in which any mistakes are permanent. While we may see numerous appeals, remember that inmates on death row have about ten years to stall; laws could also be passed to greatly restrict the number of appeals an inmate may have. 2. The court costs incurred unreasonably in defending the laws that permit execution My opponent neglects to give us a percentage of the costs involved in challenging the death penalty, so we cannot conclude much from this point. I can't see a significant number of courts allowing the FDA argument to be debated. 3. The costs of confining inmates on death row rather than in ordinary maximum security The "main costs," as my opponent calls them, are actually for killing the inmates, not for housing them. "Executing all of the people currently on death row, or waiting for them to die there of other causes, will cost California an estimated $4 billion more than if they had been sentenced to die in prison of disease, injury, or old age" [4]. My opponent provides data of prison killings, but I have already explained how his data is outdated through technological advancements in security. We must remember that with technology come both more effective and cheaper methods of containing inmates. The death penalty will supposedly save the costs of imprisonment, but this cost must still be paid on death row, for the ten years in which the convict is most likely to try and space; killing the convicts is also, as I quoted, extremely expensive. Ohio may be killing off more inmates, but my opponent's source says nothing of the actual cost to Ohio. Sure, they build fewer prisons, but they still spend much on the executions themselves. All in all, the death penalty replaces the cost of prisons with the cost of execution, usually with a great deal of inefficiency, especially when the citizens of the state don't actually support the use of a death penalty. 1+. Justice demands that the death penalty be legal My opponent appeals to the democratic aspect of the court system, in which the jury gets to decide who gets the death penalty and who does not. However, this process is plagued with terrible errors, such as racial and gender bias, poor court-appointed attorneys, and the jurors' general incomprehension of the death penalty, to the point of arbitrariness [5]. Many jurors don't even understand the process of the death penalty. Certain requirements in choosing the jury for a death penalty case force an overrepresentation of jurors in support of the death penalty, skewing the court's decision away from the true public opinion. If anti-death penalty people were allowed on the jury, we'd see much fewer death penalty cases compared to the dismal numbers we already see. How much justice is it for people to be sentenced to death on an almost random basis often decided based on irrelevant information about the defense? Regarding a comparison between life and death, a life sentence will force more contemplation on behalf of the killer to thing about the wrongs that he committed. The death penalty merely ends their life immediately, with no reflection on the crimes. While death is more barbaric, it does not deliver true justice. 2+. Execution saves innocent lives 17 people are already given as having been sentenced to death while innocent. If a person can be put on death row innocent, then a person can be executed innocent. If the death penalty is put into execution more often (no pun intended), then a large portion of the 17 known (likely more) innocents would indeed be killed. A large enough sample of killings will produce the death of an innocent. My opponent cites four different cases of prison/escapee kills, but note that these were in minimum and normal security prisons. They wouldn't have been sentenced to a death penalty regardless of the legality. Maximum security will not allow escapes so easily. 3+. False convictions are now extremely unlikely due to modern forensics I do indeed have a case of a man who was sentenced to death only to be discovered innocent. Had the policemen been slightly more thorough in their framing, we would have an execution. There are actually many cases of innocent execution, the top ten listed here [6]. While some are due to limited forensics, others are due to forensic carelessness that isn't fixed with technology, and others still are due to judicial bias and police apathy. Forensics only has a small part to play in correcting death sentences. 4+. Justice should not be compromised by a very small risk of error Again, I do not see whatever death prevention my opponent claims being worth spending millions of extra taxpayer's dollars. In Texas, for example, it has cost $2.3 million to execute someone instead of imprisoning them for life, not counting the cost of death row [7]. One out of every 200 prisoners manage to escape [8], with the probability even lower for higher security. If we assume that an escapee manages to kill one person before being caught, we have spent about $250 million to save a life. The money would easily be put to better use as hospital subsidies, where a life can be saved for well less than $250 million. This doesn't even factor in wrongful deaths, which may be more than one in every two hundred. All other sub-contentions here are better argued in their other full contentions. 5+. Justice deters crime A culture can lower crime rates if its people follow strict moral guidelines. We obviously see cultures such as the ghetto culture producing a disproportionate number of criminals; the opposite can just as easily be true. The point about race is that there would be fewer racially motivated crimes in Japan, lowering the crime rate. The argument about an unaccustomed foreigner makes little sense, as China administers the death penalty, as do most Eastern countries. In any case, criminal policy cannot be determined by a single outlier example; the overall trend in the United States scientifically suggests no deterrence created by the death penalty at all [9]. 6+. The death penalty supports plea bargaining I find it interesting that my opponent would allow murderers to escape the justice that he feels must be implemented even at great costs by simply pleading guilty. He provides no examples of killers pleading guilty because of the threat of death penalty that would not be persuaded by any other means. Murderers who think they will walk free will not plead guilty, while those who know that they left too much evidence will plead guilty; the ones who end up receiving the death penalty will likely be the ones who were framed by circumstance. That is most definitely not justice. 5. http://www.deathpenalty.org... 6. http://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com... 7. http://texasdeathpenalty.blogspot.com... 8. http://www.slate.com... 9. http://www.religioustolerance.org...