AUBURN – A Superior Court judge on Thursday sentenced Brandon Thongsavanh to 58 years in prison for the knife slaying of a Bates College student during a street brawl in 2002, rejecting a last-minute appeal from his attorney for a new trial.

Dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, the heavily tattooed Thongsavanh declined an opportunity to address the court after Justice Ellen Gorman ordered the sentence in a hushed courtroom. He was led away in wrist and leg chains to resume his sentence.

Thongsavanh’s attorneys immediately appealed to the state supreme court.

Gorman added onto a base sentence of 42 years because of aggravating factors, which she listed as the 23-year-old Lewiston man’s lack of remorse and refusal to accept responsibility for Morgan McDuffee’s death and his pattern of violent behavior.

McDuffee of Peterborough, N.H., was a senior at Bates just a few months shy of graduation when he was stabbed five times in the back and chest during a fight between college students and local youths in the early morning of March 3, 2002.

The 58-year sentence matches the penalty imposed by Gorman after Thongsavanh’s first murder trial in 2003. That verdict was thrown out the next year by the state supreme court, which ruled that a reference to a profane T-shirt Thongsavanh was wearing on the night of the killing may have prejudiced the jury.

In a retrial last fall in which Thongsavanh testified that he did not kill McDuffee, he again was found guilty.

Prosecutors asked for 60 years, while his lawyers sought a sentence of 30-35 years.

“He is a very dangerous person,” Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese told the judge, citing a string of violence on the street and in the state corrections system, where at one point he was locked down 23 hours a day because of his behavior. “This is a man who is not going to reform.”

In an address to the judge that was interrupted by a power outage that left the Androscoggin County Superior Court room in total darkness, Thongsavanh attorney Scott Lynch asked for a third trial.

Lynch said Thongsavanh was convicted under a statute defining “depraved indifference” murder that is unconstitutionally vague and that the jury should have been given an option to consider a manslaughter conviction.

Thongsavanh’s other attorney, David Van Dyke, listed factors in the crime which he said should lessen the sentence. Among them, he said, were that the killing was not premeditated, solicited or committed in the course of other crimes.

“How do you get from a ‘garden variety’ murder to this sentence?” Van Dyke asked.

Members of Thongsavanh’s family addressed the court on his behalf, while relatives and friends of McDuffee said his death has brought pain to their lives while hurting the community.

Regis McDuffee of Newburyport, Mass., the victim’s father, said it’s “just impossible to move on” because he misses his son more than ever. He said Thongsavanh’s second trial was harder than it should have been on the family because the defendant “never showed remorse.”

Suzanna Andrew, who was the victim’s girlfriend, said “every aspect of my life has changed” since McDuffee’s death.

“What Brandon Thongsavanh took when he killed Morgan McDuffee can never be replaced,” she added.

In addition to the 58-year sentence, Gorman ordered Thongsavanh to pay $9,632.50 in restitution to the Victim’s Compensation Fund.