The Death Penalty should be legal in the United States

Thank you, RoyLatham, for starting this debate. 1+. Justice demands that the death penalty be legal While the convicted murderers may seem to deserve death, justice does not demand it. A life sentence can be equally agonizing, if not more so. Being locked in a single small room for years on end is certainly torturing enough. The death penalty also carries far too many negatives for any benefit gleamed from this contention to be significant. 2+. Execution saves innocent lives Indeed, execution risks lives more often than it saves them. As my opponent pointed out, 17 people on death row were saved by DNA testing, and it is easily likely that other innocent people could not be cleared due to a lack of DNA evidence. Some people are even unfairly framed into the death penalty by the police [1], so that no amount of scrutiny can spare them. My opponent points to the rare usage of the death penalty, but this is hardly a contention in his favor. If the use of the death penalty has such a small impact and causes such outrages in society, why use it at all? He points to statistics regarding murders within prisons and through escaping, but with advances in technology, prison escapes can be minimized to effectively nil. According to his page, nobody escaped prison to kill after 1989. Now, it may be possible for prisoners to receive parole where they hadn't before, but I propose that anyone who would have been sentenced to death under Roy's criteria would instead be sentenced to life without parole with no option for judges to change the sentence. Note that many people on the list who were given parole probably wouldn't receive the death penalty if enough scrutiny is used to avoid executing innocents. Regarding Lowell's quote, anyone who would receive the death penalty should instead receive solitary confinement with no physical contact with anyone else at all, so that no opportunities to kill are available. As for the "time bomb" analogy, if the convict is properly confined, there is no more danger of allowing them to murder again. There is, finally, the fact that convicts spend around a decade waiting on death row [2], giving them ample time to kill or escape if they are so inclined. The list of deaths even includes an instance in 1995 in which inmates on death row were able to kill fellow prisoners. Money would be better spent on security to prevent these deaths than the executions themselves. 3+. False convictions are now extremely unlikely due to modern forensics It is true that false convictions would be rarer, but one may have already occurred at the end of last year [1]. Technology doesn't seem to be stopping false convictions as efficiently as my opponent would desire. Additionally, with the intense scrutiny that my opponent desires, fewer convicts would end up on death row, lessening the number of lives that the death penalty would actually save and making the previous statistics inflated. When combined with the improved security of prisons as time advances, false convictions could outnumber the number of lives saved through the use of the death penalty. 4+. Justice should not be compromised by a very small risk of error I would like to point out that the benefit to me of using automobiles outstrips the benefit of killing convicts instead of sentencing them to a life by factors easily past the billions. Automobiles are heavily convenient for every day of my life. Killing some prisoners instead of sentencing them to life saves is very expensive and saves practically nobody. I'd consider that a net loss. 5+. Justice deters crime There are so many confounding variables in determining the effect of the death penalty on crime rates, as my opponent has pointed out, that using statistics can be extremely misleading. This happens to be the case for Japan as well. Japan has far fewer racial conflicts than most other countries, as about 98% of people in Japan are Japanese. Additionally, foreigners are much more likely to commit crimes in Japan than the Japanese [3], indicating that the low crime rate is more likely the result of the extremely strong Japanese culture than any government policy. As for the claim that the death penalty will successfully deter criminals from committing crimes, the threat to lock up the criminal in a room for life would seem like an equally valid and more believable threat, as the number of executions in America is rather low. 6+. The death penalty supports plea bargaining Plea bargaining can also occur under a life sentence. One could offer a convict, instead of a life sentence completely alone with nothing to do, life sentence with a Kindle, or some other reward that seems very appealing compared to the other prospects. I would like to add that solitary confinement is not all that great compared to the death penalty, as it is still a significant punishment. 1-. The death penalty is extremely expensive to implement With the need for near-absolute certainty in sentencing a criminal to death, there are numerous court cases and appeals that must be defeated. With each case comes a ridiculous price. It costs taxpayers in California alone hundreds of millions of dollars to keep their executions running reliably, at a little over ten million dollars per head [4]. These trials also often fail to achieve the death penalty, so that the entire court session was a waste. What right does the government have to use so much of the taxpayer's money to kill people who would more easily be sentenced to life in maximum security? Because the death penalty costs taxpayers millions upon millions of dollars to potentially kill people who are probably, but possibly not, criminals who will almost definitely never have a chance to kill again, it should not be used in the United States. 1. http://beta.nodeathpenalty.org... 2. http://www.dc.state.fl.us... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org... 4. http://www.deathpenalty.org...