Speedy Trial? No Thanks

"Playing the legal system like a banjo," Carol City resident Harrel Braddy managed to stall his murder trial for almost ten years. Not up to serial killer Charles Ng's exacting standards of judicial delay, but pretty close. Now he'll be waxing melodic from Death Row:

Harrel Franklin Braddy dumped a little girl in the Everglades nine years ago to get chewed up by alligators.

On Monday, a Miami-Dade judge sentenced Braddy to die for it.

''The defendant . . . caused this 5-year-old to die, alone in the wilderness, and to be mutilated by monsters of the swamp,'' Circuit Judge Leonard E. Glick wrote in his sentencing order. ``Adults are supposed to protect children from monsters; they are not supposed to be the monsters themselves.''

Braddy, 58, was convicted in July for the November 1998 killing of Quatisha Maycock.

The child was found dead in the Everglades with alligator bite marks on her head and stomach and her left arm severed. The medical examiner testified that the girl was still alive when one or more alligators bit her.

Braddy told investigators he left Quatisha in the swamp because she witnessed him trying to kill her mother, who survived Braddy's choking attack.

He put his time in the county lock-up to good use, training as a paralegal. So far he's his best client.