DEATH PENALTY AROUND THE WORLD

Debate Tuesday 17th of January 2012, 17.00 p.m (room Barker)

CONS arguments1.Innocent People Get Excuted. Some people executed were proven too late to be wrongly convicted of a crime that they did not commit.

The states that have the death penalty should be free of murder, but  those states have the most murders, and the states that abolished the death penalty has less.  Conviction of the innocent does occur and death makes a miscarriage of justice irrevocable. 

Innocent people are too often sentenced to death. Since 1973, over 138 people have been released from death rows in 26 states because of innocence. Nationally, at least one person is exonerated for every 10 that are executed.

Its imposition is often arbitrary, and always irrevocable – forever depriving an individual of the opportunity to benefit from new evidence or new laws that might warrant the reversal of a conviction, or the setting aside of a death sentence.

2.The High Cost of the Death Penalty

The death penalty is a waste of taxpayers money and has no public safety benefit. The vast majority of law enforcement professionals surveyed agree that capital punishment does not deter violent crime; a survey of police chiefs nationwide found they rank the death penalty lowest among ways to reduce violent crime. They ranked increasing the number of police officers, reducing drug abuse, and creating a better economy with more jobs higher than the death penalty as the best ways to reduce violence. The FBI has found the states with the death penalty have the highest murder rates.

It squanders the time and energy of courts, prosecuting attorneys, defense counsel, juries, and courtroom and law enforcement personnel. It unduly burdens the criminal justice system, and it is thus counterproductive as an instrument for society's control of violent crime. Limited funds that could be used to prevent and solve crime (and provide education and jobs) are spent on capital punishment.

Generally, offices involved in the prosecution or defense of criminal cases expand or contract according to the work that must be done. The extra time required by death penalty cases typically has caused the size and budgets of such offices to increase, but not every cost associated with the death penalty appears as a line item in the state budget. Prosecutors, who are not paid by the hour, have been reluctant to divulge the time and related expenses reflecting their part in capital cases. Judges and public defenders are usually salaried employees who will be paid the same amount whether assigned to death penalty cases or other work. But it would be misguided not to include the extra time that pursuing the death penalty takes compared to cases prosecuted without the death penalty in calculating costs.

3.Pain of Death.

It is cruel because it is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. It is unusual because only the United States of all the western industrialized nations engages in this punishment. It is also unusual because only a random sampling of convicted murderers in the United States receive a sentence of death.

4.Government should NOT have the power to execute people.

A society that respects life does not deliberately kill human beings. An execution is a violent public spectacle of official homicide, and one that endorses killing to solve social problems – the worst possible example to set for the citizenry, and especially children. Governments worldwide have often attempted to justify their lethal fury by extolling the purported benefits that such killing would bring to the rest of society. The benefits of capital punishment are illusory, but the bloodshed and the resulting destruction of community decency are real.

5.Vengeance is Unworthy of Civilized Society.

6.Violation of Human Rights. Some groups of people deem death a violation of the person’s right to live. Other groups of people disagree that the death penalty is a cruel and unusual punishment. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948, recognizes each person’s right to life. It categorically states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (Article 5). In Amnesty International’s view, the death penalty violates these rights.The community of states has adopted four international treaties specifically providing for the abolition of the death penalty. Through the years, several UN bodies discussed and adopted measures to support the call for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.In December 2007 and 2008 the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted resolutions 62/149 and 63/168, calling for a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. Since then, other regional bodies or civil society coalitions adopted resolutions and declarations advocating for a moratorium on executions as a step towards global abolition of the death penalty.These resolutions are not legally binding on governments, but represent important milestones for the abolitionist movement and constitute a continued progress towards the total exclusion of capital punishment from International Law.

7.Death penalty does not allow room for a person to change. Executing someone decreases the time and likelihood for the criminal to repair any damage from the crime.