Houston County District Attorney

From the AP: SHREVEPORT, La. -- Jurors have ordered death for a 35-year-old man who repeatedly raped a 5-year-old girl.

The Caddo Parish jury, which took 90 minutes to convict Richard Davis of aggravated rape, needed five hours for Wednesday's decision between life in prison and death by injection.

Davis, of Evansport, Ohio, wept during Wednesday's sentencing hearing, when Assistant District Attorney Lea Hall said, "Execute this man. Justice has a sword and this sword needs to swing today."

His shoulders shook slightly and his head hung low as each of the nine men and three women confirmed the sentence.

Prosecutors say Davis used the girl, who is now eight years old and testified against him, a sex toy for him and his girlfriend from October 2004 to January 2005. The girl told her parents, who then contacted the Caddo Parish Sheriff's Office.

After the sentence was read, Assistant District Attorney Brady O'Callaghan said, "We are satisfied. It's never a happy occurrence like this but if you are going to have crimes like this, you have to have the appropriate penalty."

Defense attorney Kurt Goines had made an impassioned plea for life, saying Davis should be spared because he has mental problems.

Davis is the first person in Caddo Parish and the second in Louisiana to be sentenced to death for raping a child. He was convicted Monday under a 1995 law that allows capital punishment for raping a child less than 12 years old.

Judge Scott Crichton must formally sentence Davis before he is transferred to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

The verdict will be automatically appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court and it will be years before all appeals are exhausted and Davis could be executed.

Earlier this year, the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the death sentence given to Patrick Kennedy, 42, of Harvey, for raping an 8-year-old girl in 1998.

Defense attorneys said he was then the only person on a U.S. death row for rape without murder, and would be the test case for whether the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the death penalty for someone who rapes a child.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that Georgia's death penalty for rape violated the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. But the high court said repeatedly that its ruling applied only to adult victims.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.