NEPHI, Utah ÷ A polygamist was sentenced yesterday to spend five years to life in prison for a child rape that occurred when he took a 13-year-old girl as his "spiritual" wife more than a dozen years ago.

It was the lightest possible sentence for raping a child. He could have received a minimum of 15 years in prison, the judge said.

Before the sentence was handed down, Tom Green cried as he told the judge he was wrong to have married Linda Kunz when she was so young.

"I recognize, under the law, she was not capable of consenting to marriage," Green said.

Green, who drew the attention of prosecutors when he appeared on a half-dozen nationally televised talk shows, already has served a year of his five-year sentence for bigamy and failing to pay child support.

This latest sentence will run concurrently with the bigamy sentence, and Green could be out of prison in four years, his attorney said.

Green was convicted in June of child rape for marrying and conceiving a child with Kunz in 1986 when she was 13 and he was 37.

"I do not consider myself a victim," Kunz said, sobbing as she begged Judge Donald Eyre for leniency. "I'm a 30-year-old woman who has seven children."

"It was me who pursued him. It was me who fell in love," Kunz said.

Eyre said his sentence was influenced by the Green's strong family relationship and Linda's defense of her husband.

Green and Kunz's 15-year-old son, Melvin, also took the stand.

"I don't consider myself a victim of my father or the product of a crime," the boy told the judge.

Green, now 53, has held out his practice of plural marriage as a God-given path to salvation. Until he was imprisoned, Green lived with five wives and 29 children in a cluster of trailer homes in Utah's west desert, 126 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Kunz was Green's stepdaughter before their "spiritual" marriage.

A Utah court declared the two legally married as part of Green's earlier bigamy trial.