Is the death penalty ever justified?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is the death penalty ever justified?". Your opponent's style: Devil's advocate

The death penalty is justified, mainly because of murder or homicide, when you've already taken a life.

You're making this too simple. If taking a life justifies taking a life, then the state becomes just another murderer with a badge. We don't execute people for theft by stealing from them, so why execute for murder by murdering them? That's not justice, that's revenge dressed up in a courtroom. Plus, you're ignoring the nightmare: innocent people get executed. Since 1973, over 190 death row inmates in America were exonerated. You can't undo an execution. A life sentence lets you correct mistakes. The death penalty doesn't deter crime anyway—states without it have lower murder rates than death penalty states. If the goal is protecting society, life imprisonment does that. If it's punishment, that works too. What does execution actually accomplish that killing more people doesn't make worse?

Now if we review statistics for sentences, we can see that only a percentage of them change, there's still a good amount who commits to doing what they were doing, also considering that life sentences give inmates the chance to escape, and no one knows what he'll do then

You're cherry-picking fears. Life sentence escapes are vanishingly rare—maximum security prisons work. Meanwhile, you're banking on executing innocent people being acceptable collateral damage. That's not a system, that's recklessness. And recidivism? Death penalty states don't have lower crime rates than life-sentence states. Japan uses life sentences, not execution, and has one of the world's lowest murder rates. If deterrence was your real argument, the data crushes it. The escape scenario you're imagining is Hollywood fantasy. What's not fantasy? Exonerations happening every year. You want to execute someone based on "what he might do" instead of what he actually did? That's not justice, that's paranoia.