The sentence, the maximum term, means that Ms. Santiago, 30, could be in prison for a dozen years longer than her husband, Cesar Rodriguez, 30, Nixzmary's stepfather, who, prosecutors said, beat the girl repeatedly and struck the fatal blow in January 2006. Mr. Rodriguez was convicted of manslaughter in a separate trial in March, and is serving a sentence of up to 29 years in prison.
Ms. Santiago was convicted of manslaughter, assault and other charges on Oct. 17.
Outside of court on Wednesday, the lead prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, said that because of "different evidence" - especially videotaped statements the two gave to the authorities - Ms. Santiago had faced additional assault charges. Ms. Dwimoh said the disparity between the sentences imposed on the couple was logical.
"Being held accountable for what you do and don't do are one and the same under the law," she said.
The issue of neglect figured prominently in the long, passionate sentencing comments that the judge, Justice Patricia M. DiMango, delivered in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.
Speaking of that night in January, Justice DiMango said: "By your own statements, she gasped for air, moaning, and called for you twice until she died. You, Ms. Santiago, ignored these desperate calls.
"You may not have delivered the fatal blow, but the jury found it was in your power to prevent the effects of it," she continued. "Were it not for your failure to act, Nixzmary Brown would have probably not died from that blow on that day."
Through her lawyers, Ms. Santiago chose not to speak in court when given the chance and showed little reaction when the sentence was read.
One of her lawyers, Kathleen M. Mullin, said outside court that her client was "inconsolable," especially since protection orders would prevent her from seeing her five other children for the length of her prison term.
"The concept of Cesar Rodriguez being free, walking on the streets for a decade prior to when she is eligible to be released is - I can't even wrap my mind around it," Ms. Mullin said. "It's a matter of justice - overarching justice."
The judge called the Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment where Nixzmary lived with her parents and her five siblings a "house of horrors." There, the 7-year-old was bound to chairs with rope or bungee cords, beaten and forced to defecate in a cat's litter box. Child welfare workers failed to heed warnings that Nixzmary was being abused.
On Jan. 11, 2006, Mr. Rodriguez forced Nixzmary's head under a faucet and left her "cold and naked on a wooden floor," the judge said. Ms. Santiago told the police that she bathed her daughter, tried to give her some water, and then put her to bed, before tending her infant son. An autopsy found that Nixzmary had died of cranial bleeding caused by blows to the head.
In March, a deeply divided jury convicted Mr. Rodriguez of manslaughter but acquitted him of murder. Justice L. Priscilla Hall sentenced Mr. Rodriguez to the maximum term.
Shortly after Mr. Rodriguez's trial, jurors said that prosecutors had not proved that Mr. Rodriguez acted with "depraved indifference to human life," the standard for second-degree murder. Mr. Rodriguez had admitted to the authorities that he had abused Nixzmary, and that he had beaten her severely on the night she died as punishment for jamming his computer printer.
A juror in that case, Nicole Dorce, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that Ms. Santiago bore a greater responsibility than her husband: "She was the mother. It's her duty to protect her child. He killed her, and she allowed it."
Until minutes before she was sentenced on Wednesday, Ms. Santiago's lawyers tried to portray her as a deeply troubled woman who had lived for a time in a homeless shelter and had become dependent on men. Her troubled nature, they said, was seen in her reaction to a miscarriage in 2005, when she brought fetal tissue home and kept it in a jar. "She's not a monster, judge," said her lawyer, Sammy Sanchez, in court. "She's had a very tough life."
Those entreaties and the lawyers' arguments that Ms. Santiago's sentences should run concurrently and not consecutively, did not move the judge, who delivered a withering recapitulation of the trial: the bruises on the young girl, the "raccoonlike black eyes," the horrors inflicted on a sister "with five other children in the house."
"You were the mother," Justice DiMango said. "You left this 7-year-old alone, and you did nothing."
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