By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – A sentencing hearing has been set for Brandon Thongsavanh, 22, now twice convicted of murdering Bates College senior Morgan McDuffee nearly three years ago.

Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese has said she’ll ask that Thongsavanh be sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in prison.

That’s the same sentence that Justice Ellen Gorman ordered Thongsavanh to serve following the guilty finding at his first trial.

The verdict then was overturned by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. The high court ruled that Marchese’s repeated references to a T-shirt witnesses said Thongsavanh was wearing when McDuffee was stabbed to death had possibly biased jurors. The shirt featured the likeness of a naked woman and an obscene reference to Jesus Christ.

Thongsavanh’s lawyer, David Van Dyke, has filed a motion with Androscoggin County Superior Court asking for yet another trial for his client. Van Dyke says Gorman erred by not instructing jurors deliberating Thongsavanh’s fate in October that they could find him guilty of manslaughter instead of murder.

A manslaughter conviction carries a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison while the murder conviction has the potential of a much longer stay behind bars. Maine doesn’t have a death penalty.

Court officials said Van Dyke’s motion for the new trial will be decided by Gorman in conjunction with the sentencing hearing. The case will be argued beginning at 9 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 12.

Jurors found Thongsavanh guilty of stabbing McDuffee, 22, multiple times, including once in the heart, in the early morning of March 3, 2002.

The stabbing happened during a random Main Street brawl in Lewiston between a group of young men from Auburn and a group of Bates students.

The October trial was held in Portland. It was moved from Androscoggin County Superior Court after Van Dyke successfully argued that pretrial publicity might have swayed jurors in the Auburn court.

McDuffee, of Massachusetts, was captain of Bates’ lacrosse team and had been engaged to be married following his graduation from the college, which would have happened in May 2002.

Thongsavanh’s sentencing had been set for Thanksgiving week, but was postponed because of a family emergency facing one of the lawyers handling the case.