A MAN who threw a five-year-old girl into a Florida swamp to be devoured by alligators after trying to strangle her mother has been sentenced to death.

"The defendant ... caused this five-year-old to die, alone in the wilderness, and to be mutilated by monsters of the swamp,'' Miami-Dade County Judge Leonard Glick said on Monday before announcing the sentence to Harrel Franklin Braddy, 58.

"Adults are supposed to protect children from monsters; they are not supposed to be the monsters themselves,'' he said.

A jury found Braddy guilty of murder and attempted murder in July. He was accused by the mother who survived his attack, the online edition of The Miami Herald reported overnight.

Quatisha Maycock and her mother Shandelle Maycock were kidnapped November 1998 from their home by Braddy, who was angry at being rebuffed by the mother after meeting her at a church gathering.

Braddy drove his victims to the Everglades National Park, a wildlife refuge in southern Florida, where he strangled the mother and tossed her daughter into a swamp known as Alligator Valley.

The mother came to after her attack and called for help. The little girl's body was found two days later with numerous bite marks on her head and stomach and her left arm missing.

Asked during the trial why he killed the girl, Braddy said because she had watched him choking her mother.