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The death penalty should exist

I again thank Lannan for his acceptance, I am looking forward to this debate. He forgot to put his sources at the end of his argument, so they are all compiled here: http://pastebin.com.... Before I start my arguments, I would like to remind the reader, as well as Lannan, that we should care more for a governmental impact than a personal impact, e.g. the government falls apart v. one man is mad. This is because we are advocating for a change in governmental policy, and we are more concerned for society in general than a few people. This isn't to say, however, that we should throw morality out of the window - the government is made to uphold the morals of the people and to protect the rights of the people. C1. Non-efficient cost. A. General burden. According to a study done by Loyola Law School [1], the state of California has spent over $4 billion on the death penalty since it was resumed in 1978, which equates to over $300 million for each of the 13 executions that were carried out in the last 37 years. While this may not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, but in 2010 the state of California had a debt that rang to the tune of nearly $800 billion [2]. This is money that is uselessly spent on state executions that could be spent on relieving the debt crisis that the state is currently in, and allow for a higher quality of life for the people of California. And this is not only specific to the state of California, either. Since 1997, the state of Washington spent $120 million on 5 prisoners, equating to a $24 million court system cost per person, while the state currently has a debt of just under $80 billion [3][4]. The state of Maryland spent $186 million over five executions, meaning that each execution cost taxpayers $37.2 million each [3]. The state of Maryland also has a state debt of over $94 billion [5]. I could go on and on, but I decide to stop here. What I am trying to get at is that all of these funds that are going towards the death penalty are not necessary; instead they could go to improving the financial crisis that each of these states have. They could go to improving the quality of life of all of their residents instead of killing people without a just cause. The job of the government is to protect people and to ensure the maximum amount of rights that are necessary, not to decrease the quality or quantity of life of its inhabitants, and the amount of money that a state has a huge impact on this. B. Less efficient than life in prison. I could not find any statistics about a nation-wide average for the cost of life in prison without parole, so I will be using California as my basis. If my opponent asks I can delve deeper into the web to find nation-wide averages, but I believe that California is a fine example place to base this argument on. According to statistics that have been offered by the Office of California's Nonpartisan Legislative Analyst, the average annual price for housing an inmate in a jail is over $47,000, while the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation finds that the average cost is just over $44,500 [6]. Whatever the actual number may be, which should logically be thought to be roughly $45,000, is lower than a death penalty process. If we assume that the average life-in-prison prisoner gets placed in there around age 20 and live to be around age 70, we see a time gap of 50 years. Using basic arithmetic (45,000 x 50), we get a grand total of around $2 million. When we compare this to the average cost of an execution in the state of California, which was stated earlier at a whopping $300 million, the disparity of these two numbers is absurd. The amount for a life-in-prison prisoner is less than 1% the cost of a death row inmate, which as a government cannot be condoned. C2. Morality. A. Innocent death. Innocence is not committing a crime that you are accused of, and in a society that holds onto justice such as the USA, if you have not committed a crime you are not expected to pay the dues of this crime. However, as the Guardian explains in an article released on 28 April, 2014, the amount of innocent people that have been posthumously declared as innocent is at 4% [7]. "At least 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the US in the modern era are innocent", they explain. In a just society, we should not be putting the innocent to death. Having any innocent deaths is atrocious and undermines the values of justice -- which according to Kant is a respect for the right (or innocent, in this case) [8]. Posthumously announcing that one is innocent does not give them the respect that they deserve, instead it declares that the system was wrong and that the system is not based upon justice, instead retribution. C3. Personal harms. A. Families touched by murder denounce the death penalty. It has been shown time and time again that families that have been touched by a person that may receive the death penalty do not actively or usually seek it when seeking justice for their loved ones. If we look back to the Boston Marathon Bombing that occurred two years ago (April 15, 2013), then we can remember that this was a day that was filled with both terror and death. However, the parents of the youngest victim taken by the bombing do not want the death penalty to even be considered when Tsarnaev is convicted. They say in a letter to the Boston Globe, "[w]e are in favor of and would support the Department of Justice in taking the death penalty off the table in exchange for the defendant spending the rest of his life in prison without any possibility of release and waiving all of his rights to appeal." What this means is that the family of someone who was taken by an act of terror do not want to see the killer die for his actions, just rot in prison [9]. Another good example of a personal harm created by the death penalty would be the case of Julie Welch, who was taken in an Oklahoma bombing. The family of Julie didn't seek the death penalty at all, and they said that executing people for crimes "is simply vengeance; and it was vengeance that killed Julie.... Vengeance is a strong and natural emotion. But it has no place in our justice system." This means that another bombing victim's family doesn't want vengeance to be part of the justice system, but instead for justice to actually be sought [8]. If the family of a victim does not want to suffer more pain due to the death of a criminal, then why are we allowing them to? We are not truly honoring the victim's family or the victim themselves when we do these actions, and this is not morally permissible by the government. C4. Bipartisan Approval A. Example from Nebraska Nebraska was the last state to ban the death penalty outright, and they did so just a few days ago [10]. While the senate is officially and legally nonpartisan (no parties allowed, per state law), the majority of the senate leans to more conservative values. The lawmakers two weeks ago agreed that the death penalty is ineffective, costly, immoral and harms everyone involved. This was the first republican-leaning state in over 40 years to outlaw the death penalty [11]. When the bill passed into law, Ernie Chambers, a representative in the Nebraska Unicameral who has been fighting against the death penalty since he came into office in 1971 said, "[t]oday we are doing something that transcends me, that transcends this Legislature, that transcends this state. We are talking [and acting upon] human dignity." This is the ultimate weapon against the death penalty because instead of talking about something that has been on the democratic ticket for years, as was previously shrugged off as just being something that leans democrat, we are talking about something that even the most conservative people can agree on. That human dignity outweighs retribution. B. Rising support. I concede that the death penalty is still accepted by the majority of Americans as something that we should keep. However, there has been a rising trend of support of abolishing it. Right now, the support for the death penalty is the lowest it has ever been in 40 years [12], at what is considered a mediocre 60% of people polled. I do concede that support means justification for a process, however, the support has been declining since the mid-90's, where support staggered at a huge 80%. The declination of support suggests that the public is demanding change to what is currently happening in the country, and that they do not approve of the death penalty. This suggests that we should change the policy now before the legitimacy of the government becomes even more questioned than it currently is. References: [1]. http://www.lls.edu... [2]. http://ballotpedia.org... [3]. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... [4]. http://ballotpedia.org... [5]. http://ballotpedia.org... [6]. http://www.mountain-news.com... [7]. http://www.theguardian.com... [8]. http://deathpenaltycurriculum.org... [9]. http://mashable.com... [10]. http://en.wikipedia.org... [11]. http://www.nytimes.com... [12]. http://www.gallup.com...