Debate 3: Death Penalty

This house believes that the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty. As the government, I stand in affirmation of this resolution. First, I will define some terms within the resolution, and then I will move onto three contentions that the support the government’s stance on the resolution.

First, I will define the terms in the resolution. The resolution reads that the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty. The first term I would like to define is “abolish.” This term can be defined to mean a practice, system, or institution that is formally or legally ended. In this case, this practice will be legally abolished. The next term or phrase I would like to define is “death penalty.” This term can be defined as the punishment of execution, administered to someone legally convicted of a capital crime.

Now that the terms of the resolution have been defined, we can move onto the three contentions that support the government’s stance on the resolution that the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty. The state of Texas should abolish this heinous act because the methods of execution are inhumane, the cost of execution is too high, and the punishment does not deter crime.

First, the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty because the methods of execution are inhumane. These humans are executed with various forms of execution, and they are not the quickest and most humane form of killing a person. The forms of execution include electrocution, gas chamber, hanging, and firing squad. The most common form of execution is used in lethal injections. According to the Death Penalty Information Center on March 23, 2020, thirty states in the United States use the lethal injection as the primary execution method. In fact, since 1976, 1,337 people have been murdered using the lethal injection reports the DPIC. When a state uses the lethal injection method as a way to execute a prisoner, they use multiple drugs called a cocktail to produce the quickest death. However, the process can still take up to two hours according to ProCon.org in on December 9, 2016. This is two hours that this person has to suffer and wait for his/her heart to stop. This is inhumane. While there are other forms of execution, lethal injection is the most used, and it takes the longest to achieve death. Other forms like the gas chamber and electric chair are equally inhumane. Using a gas chamber, prisoners violently convulse for up to a minute before dying after the gases are dropped in and their bodies choke to death. This same method is what was used in the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. The fact that the United States, a land of freedom and equality, uses these forms similar to Nazism, or any form of killing is inhuman and abhorrent. Therefore, because these forms of killing are inhumane, and the act of killing is inhumane, the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty. No one should kill another human being even if that human killed someone or committed another capital crime.

Second, the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty because the death penalty is extremely expensive on U.S. taxpayers. According to the DPIC on March 23, 2020, in the state of Texas, one death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million. That is three times the cost of one prisoner in a highest security level singe-cell institution. Also, Texas has executed the most prisoners out of all fifty states since 1976. This means that Texans are paying extremely high taxes to fund all of these executions that outrank any other state in the country. If Texans knew that they were paying this much for prison systems to murder inmates on death row, there would be some changes made. Therefore, the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty because it is too expensive for Texas taxpayers.

Finally, the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty because it does not deter crime as originally hoped. The promise of crime deterrence is one of the most used rationales for the death penalty. The threat of being murdered because of certain capital crimes hypothetically was supposed to slow the rate of crime and scare criminals out of committing these certain crimes. However, it does not in fact deter crime at all. According to the DPIC, in 2016, the murder rate of states who use the death penalty were extremely close or higher than those states who have abolished the death penalty. In legalized Louisiana, murder rates were almost double that of abolished Illinois rates. This shows that they actually do the opposite than deter crime. Therefore, the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty because it does not deter crime.

In conclusion, the death penalty is a twisted solution that only promotes the use of violence in society. The use of this inhumane practice only shows people that killing is allowed upon certain terms and circumstances. However, it should never be allowed. The death penalty issues murder on prisoners who may not have even killed someone themselves. Their crimes may be capital, but they do not warrant death. Overall, the state of Texas should abolish the death penalty because the modes of execution are inhumane, the practice is too expensive for Texan taxpayers, and the practice does not deter crime. Prisoners should not be punished with death even if they have killed someone. Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” and in this case, it leaves the whole world dead.