Resolved: In the United States, capital punishment should be outlawed.

Thank you to CentristX for choosing to debate against me for this topic, and I hope also that we do have a good debate here today. I will be accepting the Con's definition for capital punishment. Contention 1: Capital Punishment is Unjust In a perfectly just legal system, there would be no one wrongfully convicted of a crime that they did not commit. However, because we live in an inherent imperfect society and live underneath an inherently imperfect legal system, there will still be those who are wrongfully convicted of crime. Despite this, we should still seek justice as much as possible. In many cases, as the Con may be prone to point out, the conviction can be appealed, especially if the inmate is on death row. However, there are still many who are wrongfully executed by the government. Time Magazine (1) reports that in the United States, 4.1% of those executed are innocent, underneath an conservative estimate. This means that every 120 out of 3000 are innocent, yet are executed anyway. It is obvious that is unjust for one to be killed for a crime they did not commit, especially as forensic evidence (like DNA) grows in amount and quality as new technologies enter the field of criminal law to prove that the innocent did not commit the crime. Because capital punishment obviously cannot be taken back or repealed, there is no way to right the wrongs that have been made against these innocent men. Therefore, capital punishment is one of the penultimate forms of injustice because it claims to be a just practice of the law. One of these 4.1% in Pueblo, Colorado was a man named Joe Arridy, who was executed in 1939 (2). Arridy had an intellectual disability. Three Colorado state psychiatrists told the court at his trial that his IQ score was somewhere in the 40s. Yet, he was still convicted because when taken to the police station, the police told him that he had committed the crime of the rape and murder of a schoolgirl in Pueblo and he confessed to it, even though he hadn't done it at all. All of the psychiatrists even agreed that Arridy would not be able to distinguish right from wrong in the first place. Arridy still was sent to death row. For three years he remained on death row, apparently unaware of where exactly he was. The warden gave him a toy train the first day he was there, and Arridy was always seen with this train until he was brought to the electric chair, where he gave the train to a fellow inmate. The warden called Arridy "the happiest man on death row." Arridy for his last meal requested a bowl of ice cream. He was posthumously exonerated from his crime by Colorado state governor Bill Ritter in 2011. Because we live under an imperfect legal system, there will always be mistakes made, either accidentally or purposefully (in the case of Joe Arridy). The 4.1% who have been wrongfully executed have faced the cruelest injustice, capital punishment, and it is the responsibility of the United States government to outlaw this act. Contention 2: Members of the criminal field and the legal system do not believe that capital punishment deters crime A) 88.2% of polled criminologists do not believe that capital punishment deters violent crime In 2009, the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (3) at Northwestern University polled criminologists who were members of the American Society of Criminology on whether or not they believed that capital punishment deters violent crime. The response they found was this: "Here, 88.2% of the polled criminologists do not believe that the death penalty is a deterrent, up slightly from 83.6% in 1996." Even the overwhelming majority of criminologists, leaders in the study of crime statistics, now believe that capital punishment is a deterrent. B) Police chiefs do not believe capital punishment deters crime According to statistics from the FBI Uniform Crime Report, those regions of the country where capital punishment IS administered are actually the MOST dangerous for police officers. 69% of police officers polled believed that capital punishment was just a way of politicians showing that they were "tough on crime," while only 24% of police chiefs believed that murderers actually thought about the death penalty before committing crime. (4) Contention 3: Studies' results on capital punishment's deterrence effect are inconclusive and divisive A) Previous deterrence studies' results are erroneous or miscalculated In this same study by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Jeffery Fagan showed how a famous deterrence study, the Mocan-Gittings study, which found that each execution resulted in five less homicides, had a simple calculation error that created their erroneous results: "A second reexamination of the Mocan-Gittings study was conducted by Jeffrey Fagan. Fagan"s work is the most comprehensive review of the theoretical and methodological shortcomings of deterrence studies published after 2000. He first improved Mocan"s measure of deterrence, which is the number of executions in a given state divided by the number of death sentences imposed six years earlier. Because of the impossibility of computing this measure if the denominator is zero, Mocan and Gittings coded years with no death sentences as .99. Fagan reanalyzed the data using .01 (which is closer to zero) in the denominator rather than .99. That simple improvement made all the deterrent effects found by Mocan and Gittings disappear." B) There are no studies informative enough to prove deterrence works The National Research Council in their report titled "Deterrence and the Death Penalty" (5), concluded that most studies are not informative enough to deduce whether or not executions actually deter or exacerbate crime. They wrote that "the committee concludes that research to date is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates." Because research on deterrence is inconclusive, both because many studies have erroneous results or miscalculations and because research has been determined to be not informative enough to conclude that there is any significant deterrence effect, in this debate we should not be looking at the numbers alone. Instead we should seek the opinions of those who are familiar with crime and punishment, such as criminologists and police chiefs. Both of these groups' majorities, as I have shown, do not believe that capital punishment actually does deter crime. Because of the potential for moral injustice, through the wrongful execution of the innocent, we should not allow the practice of capital punishment to go on and we must outlaw it. I look forward to my opponent's arguments. (1): http://time.com... (2): http://www.csindy.com... (3): http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... (4): http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... (5): http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...