The death penalty should be abolished.

I shall firstly deal with his counter-proposal (i. e. his own, pro-death penalty, deviation from the status quo), before seeking to reinforce my position against his rebuttal. === ON MY OPPONENT'S VERSION OF THE DEATH PENALTY === To be honest, I expected my opponent to support the death penalty as it currently stands - that is, accepting appeals as necessary to try and ensure that innocent people don't get executed. However, he is entitled to his own counter-view, which he put as follows: "prisoners who have been convicted executed with [sic] any appeal or staying. .. .to avoid innocents being executed, the death penalty should be used only and every time there is hard, undeniable evidence on the person. As it is innocents are rarely executed. " I have two, inter-related, problems with this: 1) My opponent seems to believe that "hard, undeniable evidence" is enough to weed out innocent people from being killed, but he forgets that this is the common standard for murder trials in the first place. [1] Anyone who has been convicted of murder - due to the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" - will have been deemed to have hard, undeniable evidence against them. However, the list of (at the time of writing) 139 people that I presented in the last round [2] is evidence enough that people sent to death row, with such a standard having been met at the trial, may still be innocent. My opponent's criterion is clearly not enough to weed out the innocent. 2) Therefore, it seems clear that many more innocent people than at present would fall through the net, and be executed for a crime they did not commit. Out of the 139 innocent people I listed, the overwhelming majority of them were on death row for 2 years or more, and would thus have been executed under my opponent's policy of killing them after "6 months or a year". He appears to be correct when he says that, "as it is innocents are rarely executed" - but his policy is a deviation from as it currently is, and many more innocent people would die as a result. My opponent having implicitly conceded that the death of innocent people is bad - having provided the aforementioned point that "innocents are rarely executed", and not rebutting my argument that death row/death is bad for innocent people - his counter-proposal thus falls. === REBUTTAL AND REINFORCEMENT OF ORIGINAL SUBSTANTIVE === My opponent's arguments can be understood as coming under several categories. I rebut them as follows: === WHY WE SHOULDN'T KILL PEOPLE WHO HAVE KILLED OTHERS === My opponent frames his argument for the death penalty as a pursuit of justice, asking: "Why should [the criminals] be allowed to live even if they will not commit crimes again? Where is justice for the victim and his family members. " There is an important difference between justice and vengeance. Justice for the victim requires only that the perpetrator be found and be removed from society until/unless the criminal tendencies within him have been removed. This is why an early admission of guilt is usually taken into consideration in sentencing, for it is usually presumed (often accurately) that the sooner someone admits guilt, the more likely they are to be remorseful of their crime and thus able to be rehabilitated into society. Life imprisonment serves these goals nicely. If they have been rehabilitated, they will be granted early release; if they have not, then it will become life without parole. To go further than justice requires, therefore - to demand the death penalty, for instance - is (logically enough) to not be just, and instead to be engaging in vengeance: it is literally acting to "an extreme or excessive degree. " [3] There is a reason that we discourage people from acting as vigilantes, and enforce a dispassionate criminal justice system, namely that emotions (such as "that scumbag killed my daughter") cloud the senses, and make it incredibly difficult to accurately determine what constitutes justice. It does not help fair process in the legal system if the entire jurisdiction is gripped by emotion, killing people when life without parole would do just fine. Against this, my opponent asks: "Even if you did allow them to be reintegrated into society how can you be sure that will not commit murder again? " The answer is that they are checked by psychiatric and psychology experts, and examined by a parole board to determine this very fact. They will usually even then not be let out completely - parole will come with limits: a geographical or temporal curfew, constant check-ins with parole officers and electronic tagging, to name just a few. These restrictions seek to give a relevant level of freedom whilst stopping recidivism rates as far as humanly possible. Any recidivism that takes place is surely down to a failure of these restrictions, not down to releasing them in the first place. Notice that my opponent recognises that unreleased criminals commit crimes inside prison, against people who may actually be innocent as well as those who are really guilty: in other words, recidivism happens in prison as well as outside of it, and release is not the causal factor here. === KEEPING MURDERERS FROM CAUSING HARM IN PRISON === My opponent says: "Keeping murderers in prison poses a threat to other inmates guilty of less serious crimes as well as prison guards and innocents outside the prison. " Not every murderer is inclined to pose such a threat, nor to try and escape. There is already a system in many prisons whereby such threats are neutralised by measures such as solitary confinement, withdrawal of privileges and/or having a single bed room, to name but a few. This issue causes no significant problem for my case. === COST ISN'T A DAMAGING PROBLEM === "Why should taxpayers waste money on housing people. .. and building more prisons. " My rebuttal breaks into two: 1) Often, prisons are overcrowded not due to too many murderers, but due to low-level criminals being sent to prison when perhaps they shouldn't. We should change this before resorting to killing people. 2) Taxpayer funding stops being wasteful if: a) prisoner levels drop as per 1) above; and b) we give LWOP people minimalistic accommodation, thus increasing their miserable existence in jail. Retribution, as far as it may have a role in punishment, will be achieved here. === MARTYRS === My opponent asks: "How many people are actually [martyrs]? . .. [H]ow dangerous can it really be? " These are essentially two questions, which I shall deal with in order: 1) Any religious extremist, who has committed a crime related to their extremism, will be seen as a martyr. This covers not only Islamists - such as Saddam Hussein - but also Christians like Paul Hill, a pro-lifer who murdered an abortionist and was executed. [4] This may not be a majority of such criminals, but is significant enough a phenomenon to be an issue worth being concerned about. 2) Allowing such martyrs to exist is dangerous because it feeds into the supporters' propaganda machine, labelling the state as the "enemy" who murdered their hero - the publicity of such an execution essentially gives them free publicity to state their case, making it more likely that moderates will be convinced by their rhetoric and be suckered in. This is especially problematic with Islamist extremists, who often glorify death and suicide as an instant path to paradise - by killing such a person, we are feeding into their idea that their hero is in Paradise, making it once again more likely that moderates will be convinced to follow in his footsteps. [1] . http://debatepedia.idebate.org... [2] . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... [3] . http://www.merriam-webster.com... [4] . http://www.armyofgod.com... shows a supportive website calling him a martyr.