The Death Penalty should be legal in the United States

Thank you, Roy, for posting your final argument. 1+. Justice demands that the death penalty be legal My opponent points out that because the community favors the death penalty, the lack of a death penalty would require a dangerous non-democratic elite. However, there is another alternative: the death penalty should not be legal, so therefore the people should not supprot it. Democracy is not inherently right; such an idea would commit the is-ought fallacy. During much of America's history, the majority supported slavery; does that mean that slavery "should" have been legal? The "should" in the resolution implies that my goal in this debate is to explain why the people should stop supporting the death penalty. If my opponent is allowed to assume that with a legal death penalty comes an overhaul of the system to eliminate wasteful trials, then I am allowed to assume that the people should oppose the death penalty, and therefore the death penalty should be illegal. My opponent has no response regarding the risk of 5-4 court decisions. Additionally, regarding the "safeguards against wrongful executions," my opponent seems to want to disassemble many components of the trial process; would such revision continue to have support from the Supreme Court, given how shaky they already are? 2+. Execution saves innocent lives With my opponent's intentions of executing prisoners with little time for the Innocence Project, the 17 freed prisoners would indeed have been executed. The Innocence Project does not make this claim because they are not aware of my opponent's plans. Regarding the ten executions listed, the site claims that they are wrongful, but have yet to be confirmed by the state; this makes it rather unlikely that any of them were proper executions. My opponent incorrectly assumes that 35 is an upper bound, but this does not include the unknown number of innocents executed that were not caught by the Innocence Project, the state's revision process (which has already been sourced as imperfect), and the ten infamous cases. 35 is instead more likely a lower bound. My opponent argues that in a life sentence, there will be murders of inmates and guards; however, he has never given an example of this under maximum security. He has only used numerous examples from medium or minimum security. I was never expecting a list of deaths in maximum security prison, but we don't even have a single example from which to conclude anything. My opponent's final comparison of eight to 33 assumes that all mistaken executions are later realized, which is almost definitely false, and that those 33 prisoners were under the same security that someone my opponent would give the death penalty would be under, which is also false. My claim of "increased security" was mistaken by my opponent as "supermax," but only maximum security, which is already legal, is necessary, making this point irrelevant. Concluding this contention, switching prisoners from the death sentence to a life sentence under maximum security would not increase the murder count at all, because all of the examples of breakout murders occured under sub-maximum security. 3+. False convictions are now extremely unlikely due to modern forensics It may be more difficult for a framing or bribery to work, but it is far from impossible. I already cited a case in which it nearly succeeded; had a few fewer mistakes been made, it would have succeeded. 4+. Justice should not be compromised by a very small risk of error My opponent again compares the risk of driving to the risk of execution. Since Round 1, I've pointed out that the use of automobiles benefits everybody in the world outstrips the benefit of executing murderers "by factors easily past the billions." Anything true for one is a far cry from guaranteed for the other. This is somewhat of a subjective point, so direct debating is difficult. The cost argument I mentioned in this contention, although it is also its own separate contention, to be discussed later. 5+. Justice deters crime My opponent claims that "the death penalty is consistent with a civilized just society." However, if we look at many Western countries and states, we could also see that the lack of a death penalty is consistent with a civilized just society. This isn't relevant to whether the death penalty deters crime at all. Regarding the statistics that I cited, their key points were the conclusions of criminologists and a study by the United Nations, neither of which would have the problems that my opponent supposes. Comparisons made between states compared bordering states with similar rural and urban makeups. My quote from the FBI that "[i]n no state has the number of murders diminished after legalizing the death penalty" goes unchallenged. Constant-culture studies are not as relevant to the death penalty in the United States as a study of effects in America itself, and we apparently don't see the death penalty as a deterrent, which is all that matters. 1-. Costs Death row itself is, apparently, more expensive than the maximum security that nobody can seem to break out of. A life sentence doesn't need death row security, but only maximum security. My opponent points to things that inflate the costs, but through much of this debate, I've been using statistics from Texas, which my opponent admits has relatively inexpensive executions, making those points moot. It is true that I never made any repsonse to defend supermax security, but that is because, as I said last round, supermax security is unnecessary when maximum security provides enough security to prevent escapes and murders. Plea bargaining from the death penalty may help with the costs slightly, but by the millions? Unlikely. As for the freeing of police, they would already be freed from the death penalty trials that occupy so much of the court's time, as I have already cited. In conclusion, the death penalty is unnecessarily expensive and kills more innocent people than it saves, with benefits not worth the trouble. Thank you, RoyLatham, for this debate. Good luck with the rest of the tournament.