The death penalty should be abolished in the United States of America

The following is a response to my opponent’s arguments from Round 2. RC 1: Justice and Public Support This is a weird argument, as it concerns morals, and morals aren’t objective. Definitions – From Oxford Dictionaries Morals: a person's standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do: Ethical: of or relating to moral principles RC 1.1 - This argument cannot be taken seriously, as my opponent’s main point is that it’s “ethical” to kill someone who has murdered. However ethics and morals are specific to each person, and everyone they differ per person. This argument is subjective to the person, and their moral compass, and therefore cannot be looked at objectively. My opponent states that the death penalty demands that justice should be attributed to the victims of the family, and it’s reserved for the most serious crimes, heinous acts, etc. My opponent states that if you violate the right to life, you don’t deserve it yourself. What my opponent is arguing for a retributivist theory. The guilty will be punished in proportion to their level of wrongdoing. A retributivist system is one that supports “justice” over “mercy.” Justice – Just behaviour or treatment; fair treatment Mercy - compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm RC 1.2 - My opponent places great importance on justice, which is fair enough. However it is also ethical to practice mercy. We can all agree that a system that is focused on rehabilitation is more desirable. My opponent himself says that the victim and the victim’s family cannot be restored to the status which preceded the murder. Some might argue that it’s not ethical to kill someone over something that can’t be reversed, and ignore options of rehabilitation. RC 2 – Deterrence RC 2.1 - Here my opponent cites the deterrence effect out of a study done by Isaac Ehrlich, as well as a study done by Joanna Shepherd. First I will examine Ehrlich’s study. A paper [1] by economic and public policy professor Justin Wolfers, and law professor and economic John J. Donohue, examines this very study. Ehrlich’s study found that each execution yielded 8 fewer homicides. However this isn’t in line with the fact that there’s been an 80% drop in the rate of executions since the 1930’s, which has been accompanied by lowering murder rates. This graph [2] shows the number of executions that have taken place in the USA. Focus on that drastic drop starting from 1930. Now we’ll look at this graph. You can see that again, around the 1930’s, there is a huge drop in the homicide rate. If Shepherd’s conclusions that my opponent used were correct, that each execution is associated with 3 fewer murders, or as Ehrlich concluded, “each execution yields 8 fewer homicides”, then this drop shouldn’t have happened at all. Correlation does not imply causation, the amount of executions taking place obviously does not affect the crime rate. These statistics, which show that the rate of crime dropped alongside a considerable drop in the number of executions prove just that. In fact, there isn’t even a strong correlation here, if there was, the crime rate should’ve risen higher, not dropped. So my opponent’s statement that each execution prevents 3 murders has been shown to be false, as there is no considerable correlation. The death penalty does not deter crime. RC 2.2 – Recidivism My opponent brings up an interesting point here, he basically states that criminals who are executed will not reoffend. In 2014, 30 inmates were executed in the US [3.] According to the government report my opponent provided, 300,000 prisoners were released, and out of them 67.5% were rearrested within 3 years. This comes out to 202,500 reoffending prisoners. The following is how many prisoners out of that batch of 300,000 were serving time for which sentence, again, from my opponent’s source. Violent Crime - 22.5% Property – 33.5% Drugs – 32.6% Public-order – 9.7% Other – 1.7% You can see here that 77.5% of these inmates were serving time for a NON VIOLENT CRIME. I seriously doubt that my opponent was advocating for the execution of these prisoners for committing non-violent crimes, which the majority of them did. When my opponent was giving his statistics from this source, he didn’t mention that most of these crimes were non-violent, and undeserving of the death penalty in the first place. No one should be executed because they committed property crime, were released, and committed property crime again. My opponent also states that there is no guarantee that a criminal will not harm someone while in prison. Again, there are many non-violent offenders in prison, and there is no guarantee that they will not harm anyone there, executing them is not the answer, as their crime is not fitting of the death penalty. Also, there is no way of knowing whether or not inmates convicted of non-violent crimes will harm someone in prison, therefore we can’t execute them before they harm another inmate, because the original crime they were convicted for isn’t deserving of capital punishment. Now we will examine my opponent’s stats referring to homicide alone. The report states that 1.7% of 272,111 inmates were arrested for homicide. This is roughly 4,625 inmates. Out of these my opponent states that 1.2% reoffended. This comes to a total of 55 reoffenders. This statistic is not huge as my opponent states. RC 3 – Trends of different states and other correlations Before I start, I’d like to clarify that my opponent is trying to prove there is a correlation between the death penalty and crime rates, whereas I’m trying to prove that there isn’t. RC 3.1 – Figure 3 This graph that my opponent shows is quite misleading. First they state that the murder rate skyrocketed when the death penalty was suspended nationwide from 1968 to 1976. This graph does not show murder rates from that time period. But anyways, that rise in crime rates does not prove that the death penalty deters crime, because, as I showed before, crime rates fell alongside the number of executions since 1930 for many years. If there truly was a correlation, those crime rates would never have fallen with the number of executions going down so drastically. Also, these murder rates are from 1977 – 1998. I already showed in many graphs from round 2 that in modern times, non-capital punishment states have much lower rates of crime. RC 3.2 – Figure 11.3 This is not a correlation. My opponent says you can see the drop in crime after the death penalty was re-established. However, correlation does not imply causation. You can already see that, because again, as I mentioned before, lower execution numbers were followed by lower crime rates for many years. The fact that less application of the death penalty has resulted in BOTH rising and lowering crime rates shows that there is NO CORRELATION. That’s all for this round. I’ll give it back to my opponent for their continued rebuttals and conclusions. Sources http://www.deathpenalty...info.org/DonohueDeter.pdf http://www.bized.co.uk... http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...