It seems a routine exercise, these change-of-venue, challenge-the-death-penalty requests like the ones filed Friday by the attorney defending Keith Jordan Lambing.

Let’s not lull ourselves into making anything routine about the murder of Bentley Thomas Miller.

Assistant Chief Public Defender Charles Nedz’s filing makes the usual demands and challenges in the state’s case against Lambing, 21, who is accused of sodomizing 4-year-old Bentley on March 21, 2017, in a Butler Township motel room. The attack was so brutal, police and forensic pathologists said, that the child bled to death from internal and external injuries.

District Attorney Richard Goldinger is pursuing a first-degree homicide charge, which calls for the death penalty. Nedz says the death penalty “constitutes cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. He said capital punishment “offends the evolving standards of decency.”

This is the second challenge of the murder charge against Lambing. Twelve months ago, Butler County Judge Timothy McCune denied an argument, presented by Chief Public Defender Kevin Flaherty, that the commonwealth presented no testimony supporting “willful, deliberate and premeditated” intent, which is required for a first-degree charge. McCune ruled there was adequate evidence for the first-degree charge, including testimony presented by a Butler Township police detective and the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office during a preliminary hearing on April 26, 2017.

At that hearing, Dr. Todd Luckasevic of the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office testified that an autopsy determined Bentley died from blood loss after suffering a sexual assault that left him with external and internal injuries.

And detective Thomas Vensel of Butler Township police testified that police determined Lambing was the only adult in the room at the time of the assault.

Defense attorney Nedz made two more requests of the court:

- Remove President Judge Thomas Doerr from the case because of bias, based on the search warrants he signed related to the case, plus juvenile cases against Lambing over which Doerr presided.

- A change of venue — moving the trial outside of the county, citing a flood of media attention “slanted toward conviction from the inception of this case.”

These requests should be flatly denied. Nothing would be gained by shopping this heinous case of homicide to another judge or jury in another county.

On their own, the facts that have been exposed in the Lambing case are about as gruesome and offensive as can be imagined — and every bit as sensational. The facts — not their reporting — amplify the notion that Bentley’s death demands swift justice.