Debate help?!

[Red Celt]

1. It costs the public a lot of money to keep someone is prison for life.
2. The is already an overcrowding problem in U.S. prisons and the death penalty might help cut down on that.
3. The idea of the death penalty might convince someone not to commit the homicide they are planning.

Thanks for the chuckle. Reasons 1 & 2 are basically about saving money. Reason 3 is false. In this debate, you're going to get your arse handed to you on a plate. With a side-serving of relish.

Work out what the other team are going to throw against you - and then make sure that your points address those.

e.g.

A regular complaint about the death penalty is that society should not lower itself to the point of killing a human being. In that sense, society is as bad as the murderer it's executing.

Address that with:-

We already have necessary wars (the word "necessary" is an important one, as conflicts such as Iraq were very very unnecessary). During such wars, we kill others.

Until we reach a time that necessary wars are no longer necessary, society can not separate the killing on the battlefield with the killing in a prison's execution chamber... as both have their place for the greater good.

If you have room for humour, suggest that people on death row should be parachuted into Helmand Province with "Allah sucks off goats" tattooed on their foreheads.

I'm not writing the rest of your debate for you, but that's the approach you should take: counter their arguments and make those counterarguments more impressive than whatever they throw at you. In order to know what they'll throw at you, work out how you would object against the death penalty. Oh, and perhaps watch The Life Of David Gale.

And not everything is about money.

Oh, and to make my above point clear... the death penalty is not a deterrence. Look up the stats. With that off the shelf, you need to concentrate on the idea of justice.