The United States should abolish the death penalty

=Rebuttal=Thank's for the response Pro, I must say your case is quite fascinating.I'll now go down my Opponents case and refute it.He begins with Thomas Jeffersons famous quote about Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. He claims that this supports his side. It does not, because the right to liberty is also secured. Merriam-Webster provides 5 relevant definitions of Liberty, all of which are violated both in life w/o parole, and with my Opponents new system. The definition of liberty I will bring in is "the power to do as one pleases". It's self explanatory how life w/o parole and my Opponents system violates this.Pursuit of happiness is a little more obscure, but I think we can assume that forcing a prisoner to do involuntary labor does not fall under their idea of "pursuit of happiness". So unless my Opponent wishes to advocate the abolition of punishment, this quote does not support his side.C1.My Opponent gives himself quite the burden of proof with this contention. Not only must he show this system to be beneficial, he must also show it to be possible. Right now, the likelihood of my Opponent's system being enacted after the abolition of Capital Punishment seems slim to none. He spends his entire contention touting the benefits of this, however if this system won't be implemented, than those benefits disappear! However now, without further ado, I will point out the flaws in his system.--> Cost. Pro claims that in such a system: "the criminal could be forced to work until the damages he caused were repaid." Ok, first of all in our current system prisoners often do work, however he himself has shown their existence to be burdensome. Pro claims that there is a historical precedent of this, and if so I would like to see an example of this being cost beneficial, which he has yet to provide. Unless he is advocating having the prisoners work OUTSIDE the prison, which leads me to my next point.--> Danger. This could provide an avenue for prisoners to escape. There is a historical precedent to this, look at Massachusetts disastrous prison furlough program. I'll provide an example, Willie Horton a convicted murderer (serving a sentence of life without parole no less) was allowed to work outside his prisons walls and, predictably, escaped and committed assault, armed robbery, and raped a woman in front of her fiancee (after pistol whipping and knifing the man).[1] So things like this would happen in my Opponents system. He could easily say that the prisoners would be well guarded, and this supports my Cost objection.--> No point, while it sounds great in principle to have murderers pay their debt to society, we also happen to have a 9.2% unemployement rate[2]. Why not have our honest, unemployed, citizens do these jobs? (*note, Pro still has not even explained what these jobs would be.) And if our citizens don't want these jobs, why not give them to impoverished guest workers from foreign countries? Surely they deserve work far more than a prisoner ever will, and would actually contribute to our society other than to "pay off their debts". This would also most likely be more cost effective.--> Also, how are we even going to force the prisoners to work? If they don't want to are we going to use force? Not only would that make them most likely do a sub-standard job, but it would also cause them to nurse a vendetta against a particular guard, or even guards in general. So this adds to my danger objection I suppose.--> Maybe when assessing this system, we should look to more historical precedents such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Both of these countries had extensive prison labor systems. Do we aspire to be like these countries?--> Final objection, slavery. Here's my Opponents exact words describing his system. "His victim's heir would inherit the murderer's life". Definition of a slave: "A person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them". So basically, we are recklessly making slaves of convicted killers, despite the danger shown to us through history, and forcing them to do labor that is most likely not even cost effective rather than doing the safe thing, and executing them.Furthermore, if for some reason this Contention still seems to stand, we must remember that unless my Opponent shows this as likely to happen after the abolition of the Death Penalty, it does not support his side what so ever. An interesting idea no doubt, but not one that is likely to happen in our system. (He even states in cross examination that the historical precendent for this lies in civil law societies. We are a common law society, so the likelihood of this happening is slim to none.)C2.Rather than argue for himself, Pro links several sources, not even quoting them. This is enormously unfair to me, because I can hardly be expected to look through his sources and argue against everything in them. However, I will respond to his statements anyway.--> The Death Penalty is not ineffective, the recidivism rate for murderers is 1.2% (within three years, only counting the ones who were caught mind you). The recidivism rate for executed offenders is 0%. That is effective.--> The death penalty is hardly corrupt, considering the massive amounts of attention and scrutiny each Capital case brings. Trials for life without parole have no where near the amount of coverage as capital trials do, so TURN: corruption would logically increase with the abolition of the Death Penalty. And even if it WAS corrupt, that would show how deep corruption goes in our criminal justice system, and unless we wish to abolish that this point has no solvency. Also, to think that my Opponents proposal of slave labor is anything but a system extremely liable to corruption, is absurd.--> Pro claims a wrongful execution to be a "frequent occurrence". I challenge my Opponent to provide a single example of an executed murderer who was later found to be innocent. He may link me to some websites claiming innocence, but they are hardly qualified to make such an analysis on guilt or innocence. Thank you so much for accepting this challenge, and thank you for an extremely thought provoking response.Sources: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org...2. http://www.bls.gov...