Resolved: The United States Should Abolish the Death Penalty

Mikal has changed his stance on his semantical argument. He first argued that “Con must defend how the death penalty is actually applied.” When I showed that the DP could only be applied to murder, Mikal is now saying I didn’t specify heinousness or how the DP should be applied. Both are incorrect because (1) the rules state that you cannot add any new definitions, so it doesn’t even matter and (2) it is pretty obvious that US law only allows for murder. Since your definition of heinous cannot technically be applied per the rules, it is up to the voters to decide. The information I provided pretty solidly proves that the DP can only apply to murders. C1) Deterrence Consensus is an important part of science but it is not proof in and of itself. Mikal’s source refers to criminologists, who do not have the econometric background to understand the modern research; if you did a survey of economists there would be a different result. A question asks if the DP deters any amount. 100% of those surveyed said yes [1]. Mikal claims that studies show no deterrence. There will always be dissenting studies, but if you want to discuss consensus, there is a fairly strong consensus in the literature that the DP deters crime. 17 studies show deterrence whereas only 5 dissent [2]. Of those 5 dissenting, I explained earlier how one of those found a deterrent effect. Other papers, like Donahue and Wolfers (2006 and 2009), assume that the executions happen the same year a sentence occurred [3], but this is flawed because the average wait is 15 years. The NRC report ignores about half of the research proving deterrence [4]. I have offered very strong empirical support for my position. Pro claims that it is impossible for murderers to be rational, but if you read my opening round, I noted that irrational actors (juveniles and people with mental disorders) can be deterred. Even murders of passion can be affected by death penalty legislation [5]. According to Gary Kleck, firearms ownership deters firearm homicide but not non firearm homicide. This is because “[d]eterrent effects would be stronger for gun homicides if their perpetrators were more likely to plan the killings” and that using a gun in homicide takes some degree of planning, so they “are more likely to think about the potential costs of their actions.” [6] A large portion of murderers are rational; all gun crimes have some degree of rationality and the potential for deterrence. Pro argues that many things make people irrational. I do not deny that there are *some* undeterrable crimes, but even if a very small percentage can be deterred a huge amount of lives can be saved. Using the 30% I used above, I assumed that 25% were undeterrable. The 5% deterred led to 800 lives saved in one year alone. If you assume that 29% of those who know about DP law do not care, only 1% of murders can be deterred, 160 lives saved per year with the low 1% estimate. I don’t even need close to a majority of crimes to be deterrable to win the argument, 1% is enough to have an impact larger than the entire DPIC exoneration list [7]. This outweighs pretty much every argument in the debate. Mikal must remember that deterrence won’t stop the murder as it happens, it is meant to prevent it. Most people don’t walk around with adrenaline while planning a murder, gang violence, or purchasing a firearm for murder. That is when you are deterred--before the adrenaline kicks in. The number of people with brain damage is very low. Pro’s argument comes dangerously close to claiming that no punishment can deter crime because criminals are irrational, but this contradicts his whole ‘police effectiveness’ argument. Mikal claims the studies occurred during the moratorium. This is false. All of the studies I have cited were published after 2000 when the DP was legal.There are strong theoretical reasons that demonstrate some degree of causation. Correlation is always difficult to prove but any reader will see that the strongest evidence in this debate proves a deterrent effect. Even if 1% of crimes are deterrable there are more lives saved than the highest possible number for innocents executed. I provided many reasons why the number may be as high as 5% or more. Of course police are important, but they are part of certainty. Deterrence also includes severity of punishment which the DP emphasises and thus has a large effect. I already proved last round that the effect on state budgets is not enough to decrease police spending. C2) Justice Mikal’s argument against killing a murderer is that we shouldn’t rape rapists. This is a weak argument. In R2 I argued “The state should do everything within the (constitutional) limits of its power to bring justice to these people.” Raping a rapist is unconstitutiona. I also argued that the DP isn’t mandatory but only required up to a practical point. Raping rapists is both unconstitutional and impractical. It is weird that you say the DP allows for no rehabilitation when LWOP suffers from the same issue and the rate of people exonerated is much higher than LWOP cases. Rehabilitation should only go to people who deserve it. Murderers do not deserve rehabilitation and should be punished. Equating retribution to revenge is untrue. Revenge is inflicting harm due to emotional reasons. Retribution is a rational process of punishment in order to correct a wrong. Although it is impossible to bring the dead back to life, the DP is the best way to make a bad situation better. R1) Costs I didn’t just mitigate. I had two lines of attack which Mikal has dropped: Sorensen’s study showed that the DP costs just as much as the alternatives, and if the DP just deters one murder it saves a huge amount of money. Both refute the argument. Pro's source--Thaxton--is weak. He drops the criticism. His estimate is weak because it underestimates pleas, and even using extreme anti-DP numbers the DP is not economically inefficient and is incapable of actually displacing other spending. I pretty much debunked Pro’s entire argument with my mitigation and offensive arguments. Pro argues that plea bargains debunk retribution; that is not true. I didn’t say that the DP was always required. I said that it should be pursued as long as it was practical. Anything put before the jury has the chance of minimizing the punishment or even letting the guilty offender go free. A plea bargain ensures a certain level of justice, which could be better than a jury trial. Plea bargains fit into the framework I made for justice. I didn’t say that the DP was 30% more expensive. I said that using Thaxton’s numbers show that it is only 30% more expensive, but that it was probably less if you factor in other things and use a higher plea saving number. I gave good reasons that the costs are probably the same, and at worst the DP is only 30% more, which is not very significant. The 30% number is actually a worst-case scenario because Thaxton uses a super low plea bargain number. I also underestimated the cost of life in prison because I did not take into account geriatric care and other factors which would further close the gap. Pro drops all of my calculations after the 30%. I showed that, even using an estimate worse than I found with Thaxton’s data, that the DP’s cost is not enough to significantly affect police, education, or infrastructure spending. Pro then drops that the DP is not significant from a budget perspective. This nullifies this argument, which was probably his best contention. Contnetion debunked. R2) Innocents Assume that 20 people were actually executed. It is nothing compared to the 180 - 800 lives saved each year (at least) from deterrence. A basic life-life tradeoff actually shows that the DP is just. Even assuming all of these people Mikal is referring to are innocent, if the DP deters crime, “a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid, that form of punishment.” [8] Mikal drops most my evidence here as well. I showed that most of those 20 were probably guilty. I have shown that very few executions result in an innocent being harmed. Mikal also dropped that LWOP cases have less scrutiny so the risk of having innocents die in prison is also an issue for the alternative to the DP. R3) Supplies This argument is super weak because nitrogen asphyxiation is even more humane than lethal injection. Euthanasia machines using Nitrogen cause the patient to pass out within 12 seconds and die a few minutes later [9]. The supreme court has prevented many methods of execution because they were inhumane; Nitrogen is humane. Mikal dropped the euthanasia machine argument last round and thus concedes that death by Nitrogen is humane. As there are other methods, the supplies for lethal injection are irrelevant. The APHA preventing members from being executioners is irrelevant. Organizations do political stunts like that all of the time, and they do it due to concerns over pain. Nitrogen is painless. My method has zero issues with supply. R4) International law The US only allows execution for murder. We can criticize Singapore’s actions because they use the DP in a way we have deemed immoral. We condems other countries for war all the time when we also go to war. The same applies to the DP. Just because we have it in some form does not mean we have to support countries who use it in an egregious manner. South Korea and Japan are widely considered western countries with western culture, and Belarus is in Europe. ‘Western’ is an arbitrary criteria. I have shown that other civilized countries with western societies execute people, have people on death row, and support the DP. Mikal dropped extradition. Vote Con. 1. http://tinyurl.com... 2. http://tinyurl.com... 3. http://tinyurl.com... 4. http://tinyurl.com... 5. http://tinyurl.com... 6. http://tinyurl.com... 7. http://tinyurl.com... 8. http://tinyurl.com... 9. http://tinyurl.com...