COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Supreme Court yesterday unanimously upheld a 51-year prison sentence imposed by a judge who quoted a Bible verse while deciding a man's punishment for raping a young girl.

A state appeals court last year overturned the sentence, saying the judge acted outside Ohio's sentencing guidelines. The state Supreme Court disagreed.

The high court ruled 7-0 that Hamilton County Judge Melba Marsh did not violate the due-process rights of James Arnett, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to repeatedly raping an 8-year-old girl.

Citing state law, Justice Deborah L. Cook wrote for the court that Marsh's "particular reference to the Bible did not offend the sentencing provisions."

"Turning to the Bible during her deliberations merely assisted the judge in weighing a seriousness factor required for the court's consideration, and the Code does not prohibit the trial judge from describing the nature of her deliberations on record," Cook wrote.

In sentencing Arnett in 1998, the judge cited a passage from the Gospel of Matthew that says anyone who offends a child would be better off if "a millstone were hanged around his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." Marsh concluded her sentencing by telling Arnett that she hoped "God has mercy on you and the hell that you have created."

Noting federal and state court decisions, the Ohio high court agreed "that a sentencing judge's religious comments may violate an offender's due process rights when they reveal an 'explicit intrusion of personal religious principles as the basis of a sentencing decision.'"

In this case, the high court found that the sentencing judge merely acknowledged "one of several reasons" for the sentencing.

"If the sentencing judge had so relied on the biblical passage she referred to, which, when taken literally, recommends death by drowning for those who injure children, the judge presumably would have imposed a sentence much closer to the statutory maximum than the sentence she actually imposed," the court concluded.

A message left for Arnett's lawyer, Charles Bartlett, at his Cincinnati office was not immediately returned.

— The Freedom Forum Online staff contributed to this report.