PORTLAND – Maine’s highest court will hear arguments March 11 in the case of Sally Schofield, the former Department of Human Services caseworker who is appealing her sentence for the death of her 5-year-old foster child.

Schofield was sentenced to 28 years in prison with eight years suspended after her manslaughter conviction last year in the suffocation death of Logan Marr. She faced a maximum penalty of 40 years.

Logan died Jan. 31, 2001, after Schofield bound her with duct tape and left her in a highchair in the basement of her Chelsea home during a disciplinary “timeout.”

Schofield’s lawyer, Jed Davis, said his client received a harsher sentence than other people convicted of similar crimes.

In his appeal to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, Davis compared Schofield’s sentence with other manslaughter convictions in past years that resulted in shorter prison terms.

Davis said that Superior Court Justice Thomas Delahanty II, who convicted and later sentenced Schofield, singled her out unfairly.

He said sentences of 20 to 40 years are reserved only for the “most heinous and violent crimes,” which he argued was not the case in Logan’s death.

But prosecutors have argued that Schofield’s sentence was the first under a new state law that increased penalties in cases involving the deaths of young children.