Mister Speaker, Honorable Judges, esteemed colleagues, worthy opponents and interested onlookers. I am speaking on behalf of the positive side. Be it resolved that capital punishment be deemed illegal. Capital punishment is cruel and unusual. Officials often defend this punishment as not being cruel and unusual, but how can they defend this opinion in the case of John Evans who was executed by electrocution in 1983? According to witnesses at the scene Mr. Evans execution, he was given three charges of electrocution over a period of fourteen minutes. After the first and second charges Mr. Evans was still conscious and smoke was coming from all over his body as a result of his flesh being burned. An official there even tried to stop the execution on account of it being cruel and unusual punishment, but was unsuccessful. Witnesses later called the whole incident a "barbaric ritual." It is unusual because only the United States of all the western industrialized nations engages in this punishment.
             Many convicted murderers are later found innocent, and have been pardoned. It is impossible to pardon a corpse. In 1987, the Stanford Law Review published a study and they found some evidence that suggested that at least 350 people between 1900 and 1985 in America might have been innocent of the crime for which they were convicted, and could have been sentenced to death. 139 were sentenced to death and as many as 23 were executed.
             The death penalty violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. It is applied unfairly. The death penalty is forced unfairly against those whose victims are white, offenders who are people of color, and on those who are poor and uneducated.
             The death penalty is not an effective form of crime control. When police chiefs were asked to rank the factors that, in their opinion, reduce the rate of crime, they mentioned curbing drug use and putting more officers on the street, longer sentences, and gun con...