Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, has been sentenced to death, though now his lawyers have asked for a new trial. There is little doubt that the accused Charleston, South Carolina, shooter will be likewise sentenced. The youth who turned a Colorado theater into an abattoir now stands convicted of serial murders with the probability of capital punishment in his future.  

Not only will those sentences be appealed, but eventual executions protested before, during and after their carrying out.

I would be among the protestors if age and illness did not prohibit my presence. I would stand outside a prison wall carrying a placard with a message saying that the execution about to be accomplished would not be carried out in my name.

I am fortunate to live in a state (Michigan) in which there is no constitutional provision for capital punishment, though from time to time lobbies have pushed for a referendum to institute it. Not since Michigan became a state of the Union in 1837 has anyone been executed under its statutes.

The same cannot be said, say, for Oklahoma, where, just as this paragraph was under construction, the use of a questionable and not always effective sedative to keep the state's executions from falling under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment nevertheless was allowed by a five-justice Supreme Court majority.

In dissent, Mr. Justice Breyer asked more broadly "whether the death penalty violates the Constitution." Two of his predecessors on the high court seemed to have thought so.

The late justices William J. Brennan and Harry Blackmun at different times reached the conclusion that capital punishment was an ethical and jurisprudential morass.

Said Brennan: "I feel morally and intellectually obligated to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed." Said Blackmun: "I don't get any damned pleasure out of the death penalty, and I never have. And, frankly, if it were abolished tomorrow, I'd go get drunk in celebration." Since their time, the ranks of such jurists on the court have thinned to a minority on this and many issues.

Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts are more likely to defer to states' rights in the matter of whether to kill or not to kill in the name of the People. A Louisiana prosecutor came straight to the point, saying recently that "we need to kill more people." 

What is there about capital punishment that drives the political and social thirst for its existence and use? Anger, both focused and unfocused, is certainly part of the answer. A combination of fear and the impulse to avenge injury and murder is another.

The urge to kill or to be complicit by consent in the killing of another considered loathsome -- and, what's more, to be able to do so or be so under the canopy of the law -- seems to be thought of as morally right by a considerable number of Americans. Moreover, certain brands of religion encourage acting on that urge.

Torah's mitzvah "an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth" (Exodus 21:24) is often taken as divine justification for capital punishment. But as Tevye was made to say in Fiddler On the Roof: "That way the whole world will be blind and toothless."

Most prominent denominations in America -- among them the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist and United Presbyterian Churches -- oppose capital punishment on humane grounds. They rely on biblical scholars and historians to deal with the Exodus text and others like it in a "that-was-then-this-is-now" manner.

The more fundamentalist groups whose followers believe that the Bible in its entirety is the literal word of God base their approval of capital punishment on the Exodus text. Some evangelical churches prefer to defer to the deity in the matter of the death penalty, quoting Deuteronomy 32:35 and St. Paul's allusion to it in Romans 12:19 to the effect that vengeance is God's business.

However, since St. Paul is credited at Romans 13:1* saying that "every person should be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God," it is just in the minds of true believers for a government to mete out death sentences in the name of the God who ordained an eye for an eye. See how that works?

The arguments against capital punishment are many and varied, e.g. it is costly in terms of dollars spent on appeals, it tends to brutalize society, it gives America a bad name among civilized nations and so on.

The most often cited argument in favor of capital punishment is that it serves justice, that it is just to take the life of one who has himself or herself brutalized others, has committed high treason against his or her country, or has been determined by psychiatrists to be a murderous psychopath for whom no length or amount of rehabilitation would be effective.

As an act of justice, it is said, execution sets an example and serves as a deterrent. If that were true, why do serious crimes continue to be committed by those who cannot help but know that life in prison without parole, a firing squad, a lethal injection, or an electric chair awaits them if they were to be apprehended, tried and convicted?

Tevye, Justices Brennan and Blackmun figured it out. Capital punishment does not belong on the law books of a civilized nation. It should be understood that it is included in the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Thinking about it, one  wonders if life imprisonment falls into the same category. 

*Some scholars who work with the Epistle to the Romans have hypothesized that chapter 13, verses 1-7 constitute a post-Pauline interpolation. Of course, that would not matter to those who believe that whatever is wherever in the Bible is the literal word of God.