October beginner's tournament: The USA should get rid of the death penalty

But since I’m favoring the death penalty I’m going to rebut his arguments in this round by asking some critical questions about his arguments. 1: How expensive is the death penalty compared to the the alternative? My opponent already answered this question in his argument. To quote from him: “… a death penalty case in Texas costs three times as much as holding an offender in a maximum security cell for 40 years. In Florida, it costs six time as much to execute a prisoner rather than incarcerating the offender for life. ” Three times as much? Six times a much? That’s indeed a lot. But are these extremes also existing in other states? No. In Washington each death penalty case costs on average $3.07 million and one without the death penalty costs $2.01 million (1). That’s about 50% more. In Nevada it’s $1.03 million to $1.3 million for a death penalty case VS $775.000 for a non-death penalty case(1). That’s again about 50% more. However, the fact that death penalty cases cost more stays. But this brings me to my next question: 2: Why are death penalty cases more expensive? Extra costs always happen for a reason. Allow me to quote the auditor who calculated the costs of the death penalty in Nevada: "Adjudicating death penalty cases takes more time and resources compared to murder cases where the death penalty sentence is not pursued as an option. These cases are more costly because there are procedural safeguards in place to ensure the sentence is just and free from error. " (1) Ensuring the sentence is just and free from error. That’s why the costs are higher. After all, punishing innocent people is considered very, very bad. This is so bad pro devoted a big chunk of his round 2 post to this issue. But wait! Even though extra time and resources are used to ensure the sentence is free and just, why are there multiple cases where executed people were possibly innocent (round 2, pro, source 3)? This brings me to my next question: 3: If we get rid of the death penalty, what’s the alternative? The alternative is pretty obvious. Imprisoning the culprit for a long time. But what was the problem again? Oh yeah, the problem was that we’re punishing innocent people. Will that get solved with banning the death penalty? No. If we ban the death penalty we will no longer execute innocent people. We will now imprison those innocent people for a long time. Is that truly an improvement? If you ask me it isn’t. Also, do you remember my second question? Where I said that in death penalty cases there are extra safeguards in place to ensure the sentence is just and free from error? Once we get rid of the death penalty, we also get rid of those extra safeguards. Therefore we will have more cases in which innocent people accidentally get imprisoned for a long time. To put it in one sentence: banning the death penalty means more innocent people get punished. To recap, in multiple states the costs of a death penalty case aren’t way higher than the costs of imprisoning the prisoners for long times. The extra costs can be explained by the fact that people want to make sure the punishment is fair and just. So a minimum amount of innocent people gets punished. This doesn’t happen with the alternative of imprisoning the culprits for a long time. Not only that, but without the death penalty we’re going to punish more innocent people. With this I end my rebuttals and hand the debate over to pro. Sources: 1) . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...