Resolved: The United States Should Abolish the Death Penalty

Definitions: Rule 7 states that you waive your right to add definitions. I accept all definitions except the last one. Heinous crime: Prosecutors are only legally allowed to charge people who have committed murder. Only 2 people were on death row for crimes other than murder when the supreme court looked into the issue in 2008, and no one has been executed for a crime other than murder since 1976 [1]. In 2008, Kennedy v Louisiana held that the death penalty shall *not* apply to any crime that did not involve the death of the victim [2]. So the death penalty only applies to cases where the victim was killed, and any allusions to different types of crimes are irrelevant since the resolution says ‘in the United States’. C1) Costs Mikal’s first line of evidence is a study by Thaxton. Thaxton makes many clear concessions, including that the amount plea bargains save is unknown. So he calculates it himself, and finds that each plea bargain reduces the cost by 0.4 million dollars. Not as significant of a decrease as Scheidegger (my source), but significant. Thaxton criticizes studies which find higher estimates, but does not mention the study I presented. We have good reasons to think that the plea bargaining effect is larger than Thaxton is claiming because the Scheidegger study reviewed 33 counties which were selected because they were representative of the 75 largest urban counties in the US. Thaxton focuses only on Georgia. Although he did prove that in Georgia the DP costs a little more than LWOP cases, it is questionable as to whether or not this can be applied to the United States as a whole. A comprehensive study by Jon Sorensen and Rocky Leann Pilgrim found that in Texas, the DP costs about the same as LWOP [3]. As different jurisdictions have different outcomes, the DP is not inherently more expensive. We do not need to end the DP, we only need to mend it. Cost studies tend to underestimate the cost of LWOP. They often fail to account for the fact that prisoners stay in prison longer than those on death row do. If a person spends 50 years in jail--which is reasonable because the average conviction age for murder is 27, according to Thaxton--will cost the state 1.5 million dollars, using a ~$30,000 per year estimate [4]. And in different jurisdictions it can be much higher. For the death penalty, the average time incarcerated is 15 years [5]. So the cost here is only $450,000. Now apply Thaxton’s trial estimate--2 million more for DP. To simplify it, assume LWOP has zero trial costs and the DP has 2 million, it has the same effect for the calculation. So we are at 1.5 million LWOP vs 2.45 million DP. Take off .4 from Thaxton’s plea estimate, and we get 1.5 vs 2.05. The death penalty is only 30% more expensive using Thaxton’s super low plea estimate. Mikal claims that states are going bankrupt because of the DP; this is absurd. Merely because states are dropping the DP due to costs does not mean the DP is the reason for their fiscal problems, which are probably due to irresponsible spending. The recovery has been agonizingly slow which worsens budget woes irrespective of DP laws. In Texas it costs 2.3 million dollars to execute someone [6], though such high estimates are likely spurious [3]. There were 10 executions in 2014 [7], so it costed $24 million using the biased estimates (in reality, it costs less). The Texas budget itself is 99 billion dollars [8]. So the DP in texas is only 0.024% of the budget at maximum. Virginia only executed one person in 2013 (zero in 2014) [7]. Being unable to find a Virginia cost estimate, I will use the biased Texas number again. The Virginia budget is 47 billion and they spent about 2.4 million on that execution. The DP was only 0.005% of the state budget. It is odd that 0.005% of a state budget is making states go bankrupt. It is impossible. The claim is simply false. And spending more on education probably will not benefit the school system. Federal public school spending has skyrocketed without appreciable gains in school performance [9]. School vouchers actually do help the school system [10]. The budget arguments fall short. I already noted that it is unlikely for DP to significantly affect other spending initiatives, but I think you are downplaying how effective the DP is at controlling crime. Lott calculates the DP was responsible for 12-14% of the homicide drop in the 1990s [11]. I also went through Mikal’s sources to find the study claiming that criminals are unaware of the penalties they face for crimes. The study comes from a Tucson Arizona. The study actually underplays its results because it found that 28.8% of the population surveyed knew that death was a punishment for murder [12]. 28.8% is actually pretty high. This means 28.8% of the people can potentially be deterred (number may be higher in states which use the DP more than AZ). Of course, some may be insensitive to punishment, but even if the DP can deter a small percentage of murderers the effect could be huge. 16,000 people were murdered in 2013 [13]. If 5% of those could be deterred, 800 lives would have been saved. This is a huge impact. This estimate is not unreasonable because almost 30% of the people surveyed knew that the DP was a punishment.If only 1% are deterred 160 lives are saved. The average cost of one murder to society is $17 million [16]. If the DP deters just one murder, it makes up for its costs and saves money in the long term. R2) Extradition Other countries are worried that we will execute terrorists or international criminals. We could easily pass a law that we would not execute any terrorist or international criminal. European leaders said they would extradite criminals if we waive the option to use the DP [14]. This is a strong argument for reform, not abolition. R3) Innocents This is always an odd argument because anti-DP people always want to put people in jail... For life... Without the possibility of parole. Since LWOP cases get a lot less scrutiny, the alternative means many will die in prison--so much for protecting innocents. High DP exonerations is good because it means innocents are removed from the ssytem before they are killed. Mikal cites a high number of 2,000, but fails to tell us that it is a number for all crimes, not capital crimes. The 0.5% number also for all crimes. And, for the DP, a people get let go, so the number executed would be smaller. Indeed, the rightful conviction rate for the DP itself is 99.72% [15]. So it actually is lower for the DP. Mikal argues that the FBI is faking evidence. He admits that only 20 people have been executed because of this. If you go to the original source, it admits that “The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt.” [17] So flawed evidence was used in 20 cases which resulted in execution, but that does *not* necessarily mean that they were innocent. A lot more cases involving this led to imprisonment. The DP has a lot more appeals the accused can get out. If you are sentenced to life, you may not be so lucky. R4) Supplies There are many methods of execution. I noted that electrocution from a deterrence standpoint actually yields the largest results. Nitrogen asphyxiation, as Mikal noted, may be a replacement. I see no reason why this is inhumane. It has no smell or feel so most people would be unable to know when it was occurring. You would eventually run out of oxygen, pass out, and die. Nitrogen asphyxiation is probably one of the most humane methods of execution. There are euthanasia devices which kill patients using Nitrogen. Patients lose consciousness within 12 seconds [18]. Painless. Nitrogen would easily solve the problem. We have a huge supply because it is an industrial gas. It is efficient. It is painless. So, yes, lets move to nitrogen, that would solve the issue. R5) International law This is actually a false claim. Other civilized countries retain the DP. Japan still has a DP [19], South Korea has a moratorium but still has 60 people on death row and is discussing bringing it back [20], and Belarus still has a DP [21]. Over 80% of Japanese people support the DP, 52% of Australians support the DP for terrorism, 52% of Russians support the DP, 54% of people in the UK support the DP, and over 40% of Canadians support it [22]. So the DP is not necessarily frowned upon by the entire international community, and Japan is a huge fan of the DP--more than we are by 20%. Mikal argues that I must defend the DP for how it is used--in the US, it is *only* used for murder. The Supreme Court already decided that the state cannot pursue the DP unless a victim dies. So any cases of DP use where a victim does NOT die is irrelevant. We can still criticize these countries for using the DP in an egregious manner (use against non murderers). And again, we could always reform our system: ban executing foreign nationals. Since the DP is useful for promoting justice and deterring crime, there is no reason to abolish it outright. All international concerns Mikal brings up can be ignored simply because we can reform our system and we do not execute people for crimes other than murder. We can still condemn these other nations if we wish. 1. http://tinyurl.com... 2. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... 3. Jon Sorensen and Rocky Lean Pilgrim. Lethal Injection: Capital Punishment in Texas During the Modern Era, p 158. 4. http://tinyurl.com... 5. http://tinyurl.com... (divide 190 by 12) 6. http://tinyurl.com... 7. http://tinyurl.com... 8. http://tinyurl.com... 9. http://tinyurl.com... 10. http://tinyurl.com... 11. Lott. Freedomnomics, p 135. 12. http://tinyurl.com... 13. http://tinyurl.com... 14. http://tinyurl.com... 15. http://tinyurl.com...; 16. http://tinyurl.com... 17. http://tinyurl.com... 18. http://tinyurl.com... 19. http://tinyurl.com... 20. http://tinyurl.com... 21. http://tinyurl.com... 22. http://tinyurl.com...