PROVIDENCE — For the first time, the state Supreme Court yesterday upheld a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for a crime of domestic violence involving a husband and wife, rejecting the appeal of a Narragansett man who plunged a kitchen knife into his wife’s heart.

Joseph E. McManus Jr., a maintenance worker at the Bonnet Shores Beach Club, was convicted of first-degree murder for stabbing his wife, Kelly McGinity McManus, to death while two of their three children were home.

A jury found the murder involved torture and aggravated battery, and McManus was given the maximum sentence available under Rhode Island law, marking the first time the state’s life-without-parole statute was applied in a domestic violence case.

“This is a heinous and horrific case of domestic abuse that resulted in the execution-style murder of a wife and beloved mother of three children,” Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank J. Williams wrote in yesterday’s 27-page decision, which included a partial dissent by one justice.

Deborah DeBare, executive director of the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said, “The court’s decision sends the strong message that we will hold abusers accountable for their acts of torture and violence. It also sends the message to all victims that their lives do, indeed, matter and they have the right to live free of violence.”

Domestic violence happens every day, and no community or family is immune, DeBare said. “This case shows us the extreme to which a batterer will go to control his/her partner,” she wrote.

Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said the decision “reinforces the fact that domestic violence is no less abhorrent than any other type of violence and may be punished by the stiffest sentence available under Rhode Island law.”

Susan Iannitelli, a Greenville lawyer who helped McManus represent himself by writing a legal brief challenging the sentence, said the court “did not specifically reach the question of torture,” and she said the term “aggravated battery” could apply to almost any murder. “All murder is brutal,” she said. “So it might be a good thing for the legislature to revisit the language.”

The life-without-parole law was enacted in 1984 to address “a small number of hard-core, heinous crimes” such as those committed by Craig Price and Christopher Hightower, Iannitelli said. “It really is Rhode Island’s equivalent of the death penalty,” she said. But the penalty has been applied to a wider range of cases that — while “certainly brutal and worthy of a life sentence” — are “not in that narrow class that the statute was designed to cover,” she said.

McManus, 49, formerly of 6 King Phillip Rd., used an 11-inch knife to stab his wife six times in the early morning hours of June 29, 1996. The blade penetrated her heart’s right ventricle, resulting in her death. “For a period in excess of 12 minutes, Kelly endured excruciating pain and terror that was the culmination of physical and mental abuse inflicted by her husband that had been ongoing for years,” the decision said.

During the attack, the couple’s 14-year-old son “went downstairs to try to help his mother, but before he reached the bottom step, he looked over the railing and made eye contact with his father, who was stabbing his mother,” the decision said.

McManus only stopped when the boy broke a coffee table over his head. McManus walked out the front door, saying, “Now I’m going to go kill myself.” The police found him at the beach club, walking in the surf with both wrists bleeding, the decision said.

During the trial in 1997, a defense lawyer said McManus was too drunk, drugged and distraught to have intentionally killed his wife. But a state prosecutor said McGinity McManus died of domestic violence, not alcohol abuse.

A jury convicted Joseph McManus, and Superior Court Judge Judith C. Savage sentenced him, calling him a “hardened man” and a “depraved soul” whose perverse need to control his wife led him to murder her in front of their children.

McManus was later convicted of offering to pay a fellow inmate to shoot then-Attorney General Jeffrey B. Pine and to break the legs of the prosecutor in his case, Margaret Lynch, who is no longer with the attorney general’s office. (Now Margaret Lynch-Gadaleta, she is a sister of the current attorney general.)

In his appeal to the Supreme Court, McManus argued, among other things, that he was entitled to a new trial because prosecutors didn’t provide him with the transcript of an interview with a man who played on his softball team.

McManus had already been given a statement in which the man said he was “having an affair sexually” with McManus’ wife, the court said. But McManus said he also should have been given a transcript of statements the man made to officials who were investigating reports that McManus, while awaiting trial, was soliciting the murder or assault of that man and the prosecutors.

Williams said, “All the information that defendant contends was withheld from him was information that he was well aware of, and he was in no way prejudiced.”

McManus also maintained that Margaret Lynch should have been disqualified from the case, arguing that she had a personal interest in convicting him because he’d been charged with soliciting someone to harm her. But Williams said disqualifying Lynch “merely because defendant allegedly threatened her life would provide an incentive for defendants to engage in such unlawful conduct.”

With help from Iannitelli, McManus also argued that the sentence of life without the possibility of parole was unwarranted.

In dissent, Justice Francis X. Flaherty agreed with that point. “There is no doubt that this was a brutal murder for which the defendant justly was convicted,” he wrote. But, he said, “I do not conclude that this case should be included in that ‘narrow class of the most heinous crimes’ for which this most extreme sentence should be reserved.”

Writing for the majority, Williams noted life without parole can be imposed if first-degree murder is committed “in a manner involving torture or an aggravated battery to the victim.” And, he said, “The evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that defendant murdered Kelly in a manner involving aggravated battery. The defendant repeatedly stabbed his wife as she lay crouched in a fetal position on the floor, vulnerable and defenseless.”

Since the court had reached that conclusion, it did not need to address the issue of torture. “Nevertheless,” Williams wrote, “we pause to note with disgust how truly heinous was the murder of Kelly, defendant’s wife and a mother of three children.”

“There may have been more heinous, more gory and more brutal murders in this state, but this court will not attempt to weigh the degree of atrocity associated with each murder,” Williams said. “What matters is that defendant’s behavior was enough to satisfy this court’s definition of aggravated battery, thereby separating his case from other murders in which the possibility of parole has been allowed.”

Williams quoted from Judge Savage’s “eloquent” statements at sentencing: “Joseph McManus, you were not satisfied with killing alone. You tormented [Kelly]. Stabbed her painfully and repeatedly without killing her swiftly and instantly, and then left her while she was alive and conscious, in need of help, dying in the arms of her children, to punish [Kelly] and to execute vengeance upon her. You wanted simply not to end her life but to make sure she [knew] in the end that you alone controlled her destiny, your own destiny and that of the family. This stabbing episode was, indeed, extraordinary.”

efitzpat@projo.com