Should We Abolish the Death Penalty?

• Over 190 people have been exonerated from US death row since 1973, proving beyond reasonable doubt that we have executed innocent people — and irreversibility means the wrongful-conviction argument is not a procedural objection but a categorical one.
• The death penalty tracks race, county of prosecution, and quality of defense counsel more reliably than severity of crime: two defendants who committed equivalent acts receive different sentences based on zip code and public defender caseload, not justice.
• Every peer democracy has abolished capital punishment; the US now keeps company with China, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia as the world's leading executioners — a fact that should prompt serious reflection, not reflexive nationalism.

Debater: To be announced

• For crimes of extreme magnitude — mass murder, terrorist attacks that kill dozens — life imprisonment is a disproportionately light response that fails victims, distorts our collective moral seriousness, and cannot be the final word.
• The wrongful-conviction argument proves too much: wrongful imprisonment also occurs, and no one argues we must therefore eliminate incarceration. The answer is better process and higher evidentiary standards, not abolition of the ultimate sanction.
• Many murder victims' families support capital punishment as the only response that matches the magnitude of what was taken from them — their moral standing is real, and a system that ignores it in favor of abstract principle is not justice but philosophy.

Debater: To be announced