Capital Punishment Should be Abolished

R1) Retribution/Lex TalionisIn this Contention, Con explains how Lex Talionis is true, and therefore justifiable retribution. Lex Talionis isthe principle or law of retaliation that a punishment inflicted should correspond in degree and kind to the offense of the wrongdoer, as an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; retributive justice. . http://dictionary.reference.com...This moral philosophy was proposed by Hammurabi, a Babylonian king of the twentieth century B. C. E. as he engraved the ‘code’ on a block of black diorite, regarded as the earliest legal code known to history. An excerpt:"If a man has caused a man of rank to lose an eye, one of his own eyes must be struck out. If he has shattered the limb of a man of rank, let his own limb be broken. If he has knocked out the tooth of a man of rank, his tooth must be knocked out. ". http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org...Con elaborates ‘when an antagonist harms a victim, the antagonist then creates a moral debt to the victim. ’ Take this situation from the Law of Hammurabi:"If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. If it kills the son of the owner, then the son of that builder shall be put to death. "According to Con, since the builder killed the owner’s son, the builder creates a moral debt to the owner. Since the builder has killed the owner’s son, it follows that the owner should kill the builder’s son, to fulfill the debt. This is the fundamental ideology behind Lex Talionis. This kind of justice system is not necessary to an advanced and civilized society as ours. This moral philosophy is not found practiced in other justice circumstances; we do not punish rapists by raping them, we do not punish arsonists by burning down their houses, we do not punish those guilty of assault by beating them up. This moral philosophy is outdated and not practiced in the justice system. If Con’s contention is true, and Capital Punishment is retribution; then every murderer should be murdered to fulfill the moral debt. Yet this is not what you find in the current system of Capital Punishment. “From 1973, when Connecticut passed a death penalty law, to 2007, 4,686 murders were committed in the state. Of those, 205 were death-eligible cases (capital murders that include the killing of a police officer, murder for hire, murder-rape and murder committed during a kidnapping) that resulted in some kind of conviction, either through a plea bargain or conviction at trial. The arbitrariness started at the charging level: nearly a third of these death-eligible cases were not charged as capital offenses as they could have been, but as lesser crimes. Sixty-six defendants were convicted of capital murder, 29 went to a hearing for a death sentence, nine death sentences were sustained and one person was executed. ”. http://www.nytimes.com...Con ’s contention is only true if every murderer is murdered via Capital Punishment, yet this is simply not true. To conclude, Con’s claim that Capital Punishment is justified because it is a form of retribution is false as we do not find this in the current system today, and Lex Talionis is outdated, unnecessary and false. R2) DeterrentIn this argument Con makes the claim that Capital Punishment deters future crime and is therefore justified. Con says that according to opportunity theory, the criminal makes a decision whether or not to commit the crime by weighing the benefits and the costs. Therefore it follows that making a severe cost (Death Penalty) criminals would not choose to commit crime and Capital Punishment would serve as a deterrent. Evidence proves otherwise. In a 2009 study, police chiefs were confronted with the statement ‘murderers think about the range of possible punishments before committing homicides’ only 24% agreed. . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... Pg. 10Concluding that, “The death penalty does little to prevent violent crimes because perpetrators rarely consider the consequences when engaged in violence. ”Now referring to Con’s statistic that for every ‘1 execution there were 18 fewer murders’ This statistic is proven to be inaccurate. The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation analyzed studies by Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul H. Rubin, and Joanna H. Shepherd (where Con got his statistic) and concluded: “The committee concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates. Therefore, the committee recommends that these studies not be used to inform deliberations requiring judgments about the effect of the death penalty on homicide. ”See . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan also analyzed the papers and concluded:“These new studies are fraught with technical and conceptual errors: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider all the relevant factors that drive murder rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, weak to non-existent tests of concurrent effects of incarceration, statistical confounding of murder rates with death sentences, failure to consider the general performance of the criminal justice system, and the absence of any direct test of deterrence. ”See . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... Pg. 2Con then concludes that a death sentence reminds the community that murder and high treason are wrong. This claim is completely false. We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing. States with the death penalty have a higher murder rate than states without the death penalty. . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...A study conducted in California found that the annual increase in homicides was twice as high during years Capital Punishment was enforced than when it wasn’t. . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...Con ’s claim that Capital Punishment deters crime is not only false, but it seems to represent a negative correlation; Capital Punishment increases crime. If Con is right, and that certain death does dissuade criminals, then there would be no difference in how well criminals are dissuaded by the death penalty vs. life in prison. In both cases life is imminent, the difference is that the death penalty is delayed by the appeals system and life in prison is delayed by life expectancy. Life in prison is just as sure a means of ending a life as the death penalty, except there is more time to overturn a false sentence via the presentation of new evidence. Con has to show that the death penalty trumps life imprisonment is the eyes of rational thinking criminals. This does not mean that the majority of criminals prefer life imprisonment; preference does not indicate the level of deterrence. If death is a source of deterrence, then life imprisonment equally deters. If spectacle is a source of deterrence, then we can make a spectacle of life imprisonment just as easily. ConclusionI have answered my opponent’s argument’s therefore completing my Round 3 duty.