Should the death penalty be abolished

Your arguments are pretty interesting, and I will do my best to refute them and defend my case. Also, regarding sources, could you in the future put URLS at the bottom of your speech so I can check them out for myself. I'm not saying I don't trust your sources, but it would be nice to be able to look through them. Now, onto the arguments. You said regarding my contention regard cost that reform will be able to decrease costs. Yet the argument stands for the following three reasons. First, you fail to provide any evidence to prove your assertion that the reform you're promoting will indeed cut costs. When making a statement like this, you have to provide evidence to support this claim (IE. a statistic showing that reform will save money). Without any evidence to support your claim, this argument should be ignored since there is no way to determine whether the argument is true. Second, there isn't a way to cut costs for death penalty cases without increasing the risk of wrongful convictions. According to deathpenaltyinfo.org, "Capital cases are far more complicated than non-capital cases. Experts will probably be needed on forensic evidence, mental health and the social history of the defendant. Jury selection: Because of the death penalty question, jury selection in capital cases is much more time consuming and expensive"[6]. The reason why the trials take so long is because of the amount of proof the prosecutor needs to pursue such a punishment, since they have to be absolutely sure that the person is guilty, and if they wrongfully convict, there is no way to undo a death. Contrast this to life in prison, where a person can be exonerated if found innocent after the trial. Then, there is the cost of appeals, which if we were to strip away, we would run the risk of convicting innocent people yet again. So at the end of the day, if we were to cut costs on the death penalty, we wouldn't have as much evidence to prove that someone is guilty, and we will see a lot more innocent people being wrongfully killed. But if we keep the death penalty as it is, we will have to deal with the tremendous cost. Finally, Moving on to the racial discrimination argument, you say that racial discrimination won't end by abolishing the death penalty. This is true, yet if there is racial discrimination happening, we should strive to stop it. If a teacher was being discriminatory towards a certain group of students based on their skin color, should we not fire him / her since we can't get rid of that person's racism. No, the right thing to do would be to fire them, because even though we can't stop the teacher from being racist, we should strive to promote an equal learning environment for our students. Similarly, if there is a something in our criminal justice system that discriminates, then we should get rid of it, to make our system promote as much equality as possible. Finally, you argue that killing criminals will prevent them from escaping and murdering again. But the evidence you bring up is from 1998, almost twenty years ago. The evidence is extremely outdated considering the recent advancements in prison security. "In the five-year span between 2009 and 2013, just one inmate escaped from a maximum-security prison."[7]. In 5 years, only one inmate that could potentially be a murderer escaped from death row, and the article later talks about the number of people escaping from prisons being on the decline. All other escapees would be from lower level prisons and aren't murderers but rather low level criminals, so we wouldn't see these people killing innocent civilians. Prefer my evidence because it is a lot more recent and my opponents extremely dated. From this evidence, my statistic that 150 innocent people have potentially been killed still stands. In summary, I have proven that the cost of the death penalty is necessary and any reduction in cost will lead to a higher chance of innocent people being convicted, abolishing the death penalty will reduce the amount of racial discrimination in America, and reinforcing the argument that innocent people are wrongfully convicted and killed by the death penalty. For all these reasons, it is essential that we abolish the death penalty for good.