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 ...