The death penalty Deters crime and saves lives

I will clarify for the debate that it is only those convicted of murder that will be given the sentence of death penalty by lethal injection by a judge. Your first point that this punishment deters crime more than going to jail will be rebutted within my main argument. Your next two points I shall discuss as one because they are so strongly linked. No one can repeatedly murder someone if they are in jail either and I will look into the psychology behind these types of murders in a moment to deal with your ideas about deterrence. In Britain the death penalty was abolished for the simple reason that too many people were wrongly sent to hang. One of these innocent people was Timonthy Evans. "John Reginald Halliday Christie was a 54 year old serial murderer and sexual psychopath who murdered at least 6 women. He also gave evidence at the trial of Timothy Evans, who was executed (later posthumously pardoned) for crimes almost certainly committed by Christie (who had served in the Army during World War One and been a Special Police Constable during the Second World War)." [1] Christie was later sentenced to death. Another case in Wales, the last person to be given capital punishment in Cardiff, Mahmood Mattan. This case is suffocating in racial prejudice of the 1950's. This young black man forced to live in a seperate house from his wife was given the death sentence for the murder of Lily Volpart. It took 46 years for the charges finally to be quashed due to the racial stigma and the way the appeals were handled by the law. [2] So you have no case simply by saying there is no evidence of an innocent person being executed and I will come on to discuss why even in recent times this risk of a wrong conviction is still a risk in my substantive. Also I would like you to clarify something. You headline the point as " No proof that any innocents have been executed" and then you go on to say "So I am not saying that never has their been a innocent killed on death row". You can't have it both ways. My first point is going to be the psychology of those who commit murder and why this means that the fear of a death sentence becomes irrelevant and my second point will be about cases where murder charges have been overturned. So my first point. There are three types of murder that I see as being central to this debate: -"heat of the moment" -plotted -victims of mentally ill criminals By looking at the "heat of the moment crimes first I will show how deterrence does not work in these cases. If you are blinded by emotion so much that you are able to kill someone where you normally would not then you are not in a fit state of mind at that point to have a moral argument with yourself as to whether this is the "right" thing to do so you certainly are not going to be thinking about the consequences of their actions. The only time they start to think about the consequences is after they have killed the person and in a panic people sometimes end up committing more crimes in order to hide the crime of murder because they don't want to go to jail. If the punishment is death are they not then going to try harder to avoid being caught and end up committing more crimes? I realise that this is perhaps a little exageratted but I will expand on it in later rounds. Now onto murders that are plotted. If you plot a murder you think you are able to outsmart the police and get away with the crime so you are not going to consider the punishment because you don't think you are going to be caught therefore not going to be deterred. When you get to the stage you are carrying out a plotted act of murder you are most likely going to kill this person no matter what since it has become a "necessity" in your mind. There are always going to be victims that fall foul of those who are mentally ill because we cannot predict who will be mentally ill before they are born. By this I mean that even if you were to catch and kill all those who are mentally ill to the extent that they will take one or more lives this will not solve the problem because there will be more unfortunate children born who have a mental disorder or more people will fall foul of a mental disorder due to circumstance therefore deterrence does not work and it does not prevent future murders. What we are dealing with is a human state of mind so even if you kill all the convicted killers there are still going to be people out there who want to kill and who will. Unless you can come up with an ingenious solution to combat human nature these crimes can never be prevented. My second point is that even with our modern technology we see cases where people are wrongly convicted. This can be down to many things such as the subjective nature of a jury and unreliability of witnesses. There have been many recent and well documented cases where people have been executed. An example of this is the Alan Gell case. "113. Alan Gell North Carolina Conviction: 1998, Acquitted: 2004 Alan Gell was arrested for a 1995 robbery and murder of a retired truck driver named Allen Ray Jenkins. The two key witnesses presented by prosecutors were Gell's ex-girlfriend and her best friend, who were both teenagers. Both girls, who were at Jenkins' house and pled guilty to involvement in the murder, testified that they saw Gell shoot Jenkins on April 3, 1995. However, prosecutors withheld valuable evidence that might have cleared Gell in the initial trial, including an audio tape of one of the girls saying she had to "make up a story" about the murder. (News and Observer, December 10, 2002) In 2002, a State Superior Court Judge found that the prosecutors withheld evidence "favorable" to Gell, and vacated Gell's conviction. (North Carolina v. Gell, No. 95 CRS 1884, Order (Superior Court of Bertie County, December 16, 2002) (Vacating conviction and granting new trial.) Gell was re-tried in February 2004. The defense team was able to present evidence that Gell was out of state or in jail at the time of Jenkins' murder, which was placed closer to April 14th. This refuted the April 3rd claim by the original prosecutors. Also challenging the state's timetable was a series of statements by as many as 17 witnesses who told investigators that they had seen Jenkins alive between April 7th and April 10th. The most important new evidence was the taped conversation mentioned above, in which the state's key witness referred to making up a story about the murder. Gell was originally convicted in 1998 and spent the next four years on death row until a new trial was ordered. On February 18, 2004, a jury found Gell not guilty on all counts, and he left the court with his family. (PHOTO: Alan Gell (Center), leaves the Courthouse in Bertie Countie, North Carolina, with his sister Frankie and mother Jeanette following his exoneration for the 1995 murder of Allen Ray Jenkins. Photo courtesy Scott Lewis, News & Observer.) (News and Observer, February 18, 2004) Read "Time of Death: A Murder Mystery" by Joseph Neff in The News and Observer Read "Gells Files Suit Over Prosecution" by Joseph Neff in The News and Observer" [3] And since I am now running out of room I will leave it at that. So to sum up because we are dealing with human nature in theses cases deterrence will not work and you can never fully prevent future murders the death penalty is not going to work. And even if it did work it would still not be the best course of action because of the possibility of innocent people being killed. [1] http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk... [2] http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk... [3] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...