The death penalty should not remain legal in the United States.

Opening Statement: The death penalty violates our constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment and the guarantee of due process of law and the equal protection of laws. The enactment of the death penalty serves to be inconsistent with fundamental values of our democratic system. Capital punishment does not deter crime, and it is uncivilized in theory and unfair in practice. Contentions: I. Discrimination and Racism: a)In 96% of the states where there have been reviews of race and the death penalty, there was a pattern of either race-of victim or race-of-defendant discrimination, or both. (Prof. David Baldus report to the ABA, 1998). b) 98% of the chief district attorneys in death penalty states are white; only 1% are black. (Prof. Jeffrey Pokorak, Cornell Law Review, 1998). c) A comprehensive study of the death penalty in North Carolina found that the odds of receiving a death sentence rose by 3.5 times among those defendants whose victims were white. (Prof. Jack Boger and Dr. Isaac Unah, University of North Carolina, 2001). d) A study in California found that those who killed whites were over 3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks and over 4 times more likely than those who killed Latinos. (Pierce & Radelet, Santa Clara Law Review 2005). II. Deterrence: a) According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies, 88% of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. (Radelet & Lacock, 2009) b) Consistent with previous years, the 2006 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate. The South accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast, which has less than 1% of all executions, again had the lowest murder rate. III. Financial Factors: a) The California death penalty system costs taxpayers $114 million per year beyond the costs of keeping convicts locked up for life. Taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for each of the state's executions. (L. A. Times, March 6, 2005) b) In Kansas, the costs of capital cases are 70% more expensive than comparable non-capital cases, including the costs of incarceration. (Kansas Performance Audit Report, December 2003). c) In Indiana, the total costs of the death penalty exceed the complete costs of life without parole sentences by about 38%, assuming that 20% of death sentences are overturned and reduced to life. (Indiana Criminal Law Study Commission, January 10, 2002). d) The most comprehensive study in the country found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million per execution over the costs of sentencing murderers to life imprisonment. The majority of those costs occur at the trial level. (Duke University, May 1993). e) Enforcing the death penalty costs Florida $51 million a year above what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole. Based on the 44 executions Florida had carried out since 1976, that amounts to a cost of $24 million for each execution. (Palm Beach Post, January 4, 2000). f) In Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. (Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992). IV. Public Opinion: a) The May 2006 Gallup Poll found that overall support of the death penalty was 65% (down from 80% in 1994). The same poll revealed that when respondents are given the choice of life without parole as an alternate sentencing option, more choose life without parole (48%) than the death penalty (47%). b) A 1995 Hart Research Poll of police chiefs in the US found that the majority of the chiefs do not believe that the death penalty is an effective law enforcement tool. These contentions are supported from this source: . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... If difficulty is experienced in retrieving the file, the main center for death penalty information is: . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... Additional Contentions: I. Cruel and Unusual: The death penalty goes against the eighth amendment. It is cruel and unusual due to the uses of various forms of execution. Even lethal injection can bring hours of pain when it does not function properly. II. The right to life and killing: Everyone has the right to life. It is immoral and unethical to take the life of someone. The death penalty kills the convicted and levels the government with the perpetrator. It teaches the old "eye for an eye" theory. However, an eye for an eye makes the world go blind. The death penalty encourages more uses of killing the convicted and does not set a healthy example for society. III. Innocence: There are still cases where the convicted was actually proven innocent, but after the execution was finished. There is margin for error and the death penalty does not give back a life that may be innocent. IV. Actual Punishment: The death penalty does not give the convicted the best form of punishment. Capital punishment ends the life of the convicted and he/she finds himself/herself getting out of trouble in a relatively painless way. Life in prison is a real punishment for the convicted: it gives him/her an especially long time to think about his/her shame and the way he/she ruined his/her life. This shall be all for now. I await my opponent's response, and thank her and the audience for participating. Sources: 1) . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... 2) . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... 3) . http://users.rcn.com...