A Baton Rouge man will not get a new trial after a jury convicted him of stuffing his live-in girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter in a suitcase after he found her unresponsive, driving her to a marsh in Mississippi and burying her body in a shallow grave along the banks of the Pearl River.

A Baton Rouge judge denied Phillip Kegan Gardner’s request to be tried before a new jury after his attorneys argued that jurors at his original trial used unlawful rationale to find him guilty of second-degree murder earlier this year. That conviction, under state law, fates Gardner to a mandatory life term in prison when he goes before District Judge Fred Crifasi to receive his sentence Oct. 8.

State prosecutors and Gardner’s attorneys submitted briefs and squared off before Crifasi on two different he

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