The Death Penalty Should be Abolished!

Thanks, 9space. It's been fun. I will now proceed to finish off what's left of your arguments ^_^ CA1: Justice Pro basically concedes this argument. He only provides a broken link which supposedly shows that LWOP convicts commit suicide. Even if this is true (which we have no basis for believing), it would not adequately address my rebuttal, because if death was really preferable to life in prison, the *vast majority* of people with long-term prison sentences would commit suicide, which even Pro doesn't claim his source shows. I have, indeed, demonstrated that death is the ultimate punishment. This contention *alone* wins me the debate-- if the purpose of the justice system is to serve justice, and the death penalty is necessary to serve justice, then the death penalty is necessary and cannot be abolished. The resolution is negated. CA2: Cost Pro totally ignores my initial and most crucial rebuttal to this argument: that no monetary value can be placed on justice. If someone deserves to die (which my opponent has conceded does happen) then they should die-- the cost of administering that necessary punishment is irrelevant. By failing to address this point, Pro has already lost this contention. As for his response to my secondary rebuttal regarding the savings obtained from plea bargaining, his only substantial point is that judges might abuse plea-bargaining to increase their 'guilty plea rates', but this is patently false because the death penalty IS legal as of now and plea-bargaining IS widely used, yet no such notable trend actually exists. Pro cannot claim that "X policy would result in Y" if X policy has already been enacted and does not result in Y at all. .. CA3: Innocents Pro's rebuttal here makes no sense and misses all the most damaging parts of my rebuttal. Not only does he fail to address my point about the hugely increased accuracy rate of forensic investigations, but he also neglects to actually provide examples of postmortem exonerations occurring in modern times to back up his assertion that the execution of innocents is an inevitable result of the DP. All he does is give an incoherent mess of a rebuttal (I literally have no idea what he is trying to say) to my less vital point regarding how it is more probable that there are probably some innocent people that have died in prison. CA4: Discrimination Pro attempts to argue that the irreversible nature of the death penalty makes cases of unfair racism-based sentences more damaging, since those who have been imprisoned can still make appeals. However, this actually serves as a plus point for the death penalty because the numerous appeals involved in any death penalty sentence greatly minimizes the chance of such racially biased judgments actually being administered. And anyways, one could argue that other punishments are similarly irreversible because if the court that passed the unfair sentence is racially biased, then it is highly unlikely that the sentence will change upon appeal. CA5: Deaths Conceded. CA6: Cheap Labor Once again, Pro neglects to address the main defeater of this argument: that justice should be served regardless of the potential benefits that could be reaped otherwise. But besides that, Pro largely misses the point of my ethics-centered rebuttal; the point is that taking advantage of a convict's lack of rights and virtually enslaving them for cheap labor goes far beyond what the state is empowered to do, which is simply to serve justice-- there is a significant difference between stripping someone of their rights in order to serve justice, and taking advantage of someone who has had their rights stripped for material gain. CA7: Majority Rule Pro drops his original contention about religion, shifting the focus to trying to show that the American public as a whole is against the death penalty. Firstly, I will note that information from an unaffiliated source such as Gallup Polls should be regarded more highly than information from an organization which specifically aims to collect anti-DP statistics such as the Death Penalty Information Center. Pro has done nothing to convince us that we should accept his statistics over mine, which clearly show American popular support *for* the death penalty. Secondly, even according to his own source, there is only a 6% difference between those who support LWOP and those who support the DP, which can hardly be considered grounds for rejecting the death penalty on its own-- it is more or less insignificant. CA8: Deterrence Pro's point about police chiefs ranking the Death Penalty last in terms of crime prevention is irrelevant. I never once argued that the death penalty is the best way of reducing crime, or even a highly effective way; in fact, I have readily admitted from the outset that the deterrence effect of the DP is minimal. But logic and evidence indicate that the effect *is* existent, and that observation does serve to bolster the practical benefits of keeping the DP legal. CA9: Recidivism Pro's offers two arguments. His first argument operates on the assumption that my justice argument holds up, claiming that since some people die in prison, being sent to prison is somehow the equivalent of the death penalty, in which case imprisonment is preferable due to its lesser costs. But there is a major flaw with the notion that imprisonment is the equivalent of the DP because of in-prison deaths-- sending all death-deserving criminals to prison does not even come close to ensuring that all of them will actually die! Thus, the central premise of this argument is completely false, rendering the whole of it to be invalid. Pro's second argument is also based on the fallacious idea of the DP and LWOP being equivalent, and should be rejected for the same reasons as the first. ============ CONCLUSION ============ The resolution is first and foremost negated on the basis that Pro has failed to refute my argument regarding the DP's necessity in properly serving justice-- the most serious crimes deserve the most serious punishments, and death is definitely the most serious punishment (both points were basically conceded by Pro). Furthermore, each and every one of Pro's arguments against the DP have been completely refuted, especially since the precedence-of-justice argument has gone untouched by Pro. Lastly, I have demonstrated that there are some practical benefits of the death penalty's implementation (besides the general sense of security people get from knowing their government will properly deal with the scum of society), neither of which Pro has been able to cast sufficient doubt upon. The resolution is negated.