Delilah Williams will face sentencing in U.S. District Court on July 8 for her role in the 2005 child abuse beating death of her 5-year-old stepdaughter, Talia.

According to the terms of her plea agreement, she will get 20 years in prison for killing the girl as part of a practice and pattern of assault and torture.

Williams, 30, has already spent nine years in custody.

She testified during the trial of her husband, Naeem Williams, that she beat Talia Williams with a belt, lifted her stepdaughter up by the hair — pulling out clumps of it — slammed the girl’s head into a wall and stomped on the her. Her husband testified that he also saw her shove the girl to the floor and kick her.

Her lawyer, Alexander Silvert, said Friday that the government didn’t know any of this until after it had already offered Delilah Williams a plea deal.

"They had no idea," he said.

She was facing a mandatory life prison term. The deal — struck in order to get her to talk — reduced her sentence to 20 years.

Prosecutor Steven Mellin said the government learned of the extent of Delilah Williams’ contribution to the girl’s death in 2006, when she followed through on her agreement and described how the child had been treated.

"As she testified, she explained this whole process — that in November 2006 she had an entire debriefing and pled guilty in the early part of December 2006," he said.

Silvert said, "And so everybody was stuck with this deal."

But he said Delilah Williams’ testimony was valuable to the government because it had no idea what was happening in the Williams household.

When her husband admitted to beating his daughter to Army criminal investigators in July 2005, he told them his wife had nothing to do with her death. Delilah Williams maintained that the child suffered her fatal injuries when she fell in the shower, the story her husband told her to tell authorities.

"Our position was, given what she (later) admitted, how can you impose death on her husband when in reality she did everything but the final blow? I hope the jury understood that," Silvert said.

On the jurors’ special-findings form, they indicated that only one of them believed Delilah Williams was responsible for injuries that contributed to the girl’s death, and none of them thought she was equally culpable.

The jurors had found Naeem Williams guilty of capital murder for killing his daughter through child abuse and guilty of a second capital murder charge for killing the girl as part of a practice and pattern of assault and torture.

Delilah Williams pleaded guilty to only the second charge.

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Star-Advertiser reporter Susan Essoyan contributed to this report.