Death Penalty in the United States

Affirmative:

�’Why do we kill people who kill people to prove that it's wrong to kill people? It's not about his soul. It's about our souls -- the community's soul. It deals with the sanctity of life’’

It is because I agree with Justice Daniel Gaul that I stand in total affirmation of today’s resolution. �Resolved that a just society ought not use the death penalty as a form of punishment’. Before the truth of the resolution is proved, the affirmative shall provide the following definitions to clarify the round.

Just-Acting with moral fairness and impartiality.

Punishment-A penalty inflicted by a court of justice on a convicted offender for the purposes of reformation, prevention and deterrence.

Society-a structured community of people bound together by similar traditions, institutions, or nationality

Death Penalty-Sentence of Punishment by execution.

As a framework for resolutional analysis for this round, the affirmative requests that this round be based and debated on real world findings. If the negative chooses to negate this basic framework then the case automatically falls apart since in a theoretical just society there are no crimes and there is no evil and thus there are no murders. Therefore there is no need for a death penalty and thus the ballot should therefore be signed for the affirmative. Also this resolution was written as a general theoretical norm therefore the negative is automatically disallowed to use a set of potential extreme cases to win. Such as in the case of Hitler and the Nuremberg trials.

With all that in mind, I offer the value of justice. Justice is the paramount value in a round being asked to determine what a just society ought to do. Justice is contextual and historical and a just society must therefore evolve from a historical experience of society. Thus justice must be viewed in hindsight seeking to correct historical wrongs or to minimally avoid the repetition of historical injustices.

The Criterion to be used to evaluate this round shall be �’Equality under the law’’ which is an essential figure of a just society because the root of injustice is allowing the fallible legal system to exploit the rights of the weak.

Contention 1-Mistakes Cost lives.

The legal system is fallible. Despite any society’s best efforts there is no guarantee of absolute justice in terms of determining guilt or innocence. Martin O Malley wrote in the Washington Post of this year that a public policy that occasionally results in the killing of an innocent person cannot be justified. Timothy Floyd, professor at Texas Tech University of Law agreed when he noted that it is far too easy to execute the innocent. He wrote �’since 1973 over 90 people in 22 states have been released from the death row because they were innocent. The US Supreme Court has ruled that it is not a constitutional violation to execute a defendant who is actually innocent of the crime. In order to obtain post conviction relief from the courts it is not enough for the defendant to prove his innocence; he must also prove an independent constitutional violation in his conviction or sentence’. Infact Rhode Island did away with the death penalty in 92 when 2 innocent people were executed. According to DPIC (Death Penalty Information Centre since 1989, 8 people in all of US were executed for crimes they were later exonerated from. Also there were countless cases in which there was still substantial doubt in the mind of judges about the conviction of those people when they were put to death. In 2001, the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School analyzed the cases of death sentences in the US over the past 10 years and found that 86 of those convicted were either innocent or deserved a lesser severity of sentence. The main causes were the mishandling of scientific evidence and eyewitness error. Professor Liebman of DePaul Review