PORTLAND – The lawyer for former state social worker Sally Schofield told Maine supreme court justices Wednesday that his client’s 20-year sentence in the asphyxiation death of her 5-year-old foster child was too severe.

The sentencing judge, Superior Court Justice Thomas Delahanty, didn’t fairly compare Schofield’s sentence to similar cases in Maine, Jed Davis told the Maine Supreme Judicial Court during a 45-minute hearing.

“It’s our position that he didn’t follow what the law requires,” he said.

But Deputy Attorney General Bill Stokes said the sentence was appropriate given Schofield’s lack of remorse and the nature of Logan Marr’s death, which he called “tantamount to torture.”

Schofield, he said, forced Logan to sit in a high chair in the basement of her Chelsea home, where she bound her arms and wrapped her head in 42 feet of duct tape, clamping her jaw shut so she couldn’t breathe.

“Logan Marr’s death was slow, agonizing and cruel,” Stokes said.

The supreme court last year overturned Schofield’s original sentence of 28 years for her manslaughter conviction in 2002. In a split decision, justices said the judge couldn’t sentence Schofield to more than 20 years without a jury’s finding that the crime was especially heinous.

Delahanty then sentenced Schofield to 20 years in prison in October. Davis appealed the second sentence in November, arguing that it was excessive, especially for a defendant with no criminal record.

In his brief before the court, Davis cited several cases that he argued were worse than Schofield’s but where the defendants got shorter sentences. He said the maximum sentence Delahanty could give Schofield was 20 years, but that her crime was not so heinous as to warrant the maximum.

In one of the manslaughter cases cited, Sherry Cotton received a 10-year sentence with five years suspended after her conviction in 1991 in the death of her 2-month-old son, who suffocated after Cotton stuffed a sock into his mouth to keep him from crying. The boy also had numerous broken bones.

In 1989, Mary Ann Fitzherbert received a 15-year sentence with seven years suspended for beating her 5-year-old stepson’s head against the wall for lying about the location of a bar of soap.

Justice Warren Silver told Stokes that there are instances of similar crimes with shorter sentences than Schofield’s.

Justice Donald Alexander countered that there are also examples of manslaughter convictions with longer sentences, including one case where a man was sentenced to 40 years after chaining his marijuana-growing partner to a tree and wrapping his head in duct tape.

The supreme court declined to review that sentence on appeal.

Logan Marr’s grandmother, Elaine Wagg of Bowdoin, said after the hearing that it’s time for Schofield to stop appealing her case.

“She needs to do her time,” she said. “She tortured that child.”