The death penalty targets the poor

The argument

The criminal justice system should strive to provide all people, even the disadvantaged, with adequate representation. However, this is often not the case. According to the Penal Reform Institute, "death row prisoners in Pakistan, the United States, China, Malaysia, Malawi, and Nigeria have little in common – except that they are poor." This commonality reflects the grievous tendency of death penalty sentences to target poor people. In capital cases, defendants often cannot afford to hire an experienced attorney and must settle for sub-par representation. Although some jurisdictions provide poor individuals with lawyers, they are often overworked, inexperienced with capital cases, or underpaid. As a result, impoverished people are far more likely to receive the death penalty than those with better resources. The death penalty disproportionately affects impoverished people. For this reason, we should abolish it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although it is tragic that poor people receive death penalty sentences most often, this issue reflects a need to strengthen public defense programs- not to abolish the death penalty. We cannot use flaws within our criminal justice system as a reason to abolish certain punishments, because these problems do not reflect an issue with the death penalty itself, simply with the way it is applied.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise states an ideal that everyone in this debate accepts, and so does no work against capital punishment specifically — inadequate representation is a defect of the system that would remain in place for every other sentence. [Rejecting P2] Unequal counsel is well documented, but the premise supports a conclusion about funding indigent defence rather than about the penalty itself, which is the standard reply the argument does not answer. [Rejecting P3] "Targets" also overstates what the evidence shows: a disparity in who is sentenced is an outcome rather than an aim, and the strongest version of this case turns on irreversibility — that an error made under poor representation cannot be corrected afterwards — which the argument never reaches.