"He’s a young kid, and people will identify with him because of that. It’ll be in the media far more dramatically if he gets the penalty than if he doesn’t..."

"... and that’s a good argument for not giving him the death penalty.... He would become both a religious martyr, and a civil rights martyr." If, on the other hand, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is convicted and given a life sentence: "He will live in obscurity in jail and no one will remember him, not in two or three years."

Said Alan Dershowitz, an opponent of the death penalty, making the same points against the death penalty he would always make, and asserting "If [Tsarnaev] doesn’t get the death penalty then no one should."

Prosecutors announced yesterday that they are seeking the death penalty.

Do you agree with Dershowitz that what Tsarnaev is charged with doing is more deserving of the death penalty than anything else you can think of? Or do you think that's not exactly what Dershowitz is saying? Dershowitz thinks no one should get the death penalty, but we'd better have the guts to give it to baby-faced Tsarnaev, or shame on us for accepting the state's imposition of death on all the far less cute convicts at whose photographs we scarcely glance.