Worcester County prosecutors urged a judge to sentence Joshua Hubert, the man convicted last month of kidnapping and strangling a 7-year-old girl before throwing her off a bridge, to more than 30 years in prison.

Hubert was convicted of two counts of attempted murder and one count each of strangulation or suffocation and kidnapping a child following a jury trial in Worcester Superior Court. He is set to be sentenced on Friday morning.

Prosecutors, in a sentencing memo filed this week, asked Judge Karin Bell to sentence Hubert to 18 to 20 years in prison for each attempted murder count, with the sentences running consecutively.

Assistant District Attorney Mark McShera also recommended a sentence of 14 to 15 years on the kidnapping charge, which would run concurrent to the attempted murder sentence.

McShera also recommended 10 years of probation for Hubert for the strangulation and that he be required to register as a sex offender upon release.

The sentence proposed in the memo is a significant upward departure from what the sentencing guidelines call for, McShera acknowledged.

The guidelines call for a sentence of 5 to 7 1/2 years for convictions of attempted murder or kidnapping a child, and up to two years for strangulation.

The "significant upward departure ... is based upon the heinous nature of the defendant's offenses," the memo reads. "There is no mitigation, justification, or excuse for the defendant's actions."

The crimes committed by Hubert include four aggravating factors that should drive a lengthier sentence, prosecutors wrote.

Hubert "treated the 7-year-old victim with particular cruelty by strangling her to the point of her facial blood vessels exploding and throwing her off a bridge with the hope she would drown," the memo reads. "The victim is lucky to have survived the defendant's brutal attack."

Prosecutors had also accused Hubert of raping the young girl, but jurors cleared him of those charges.

But jurors ultimately found prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Hubert took his friend's 7-year-old daughter from her grandparents' home as she slept after a family party on Aug. 27, 2017, then drove around Worcester with the child before strangling her and throwing her off the Interstate 290 overpass into Lake Quinsigamond.

"Justice was not done here today, period," Hubert's attorney, Kevin Larson, said outside the Worcester County Superior courtroom after the conviction.

"I feel like I'm living in a real-life 'To Kill a Mockingbird' ... I don't know how a rational juror looks at this evidence and says that Josh Hubert is guilty of these offenses," Larson said.

Larson has indicated that Hubert will pursue an appeal of his conviction once he is sentenced. He has yet to file his own sentencing memo.