An appeals court has upheld the conviction of a man who, having already spent more than a decade in prison for beating his girlfriend into a severely disabled state, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after her 2009 death.

Ralph Donaldson’s guilty plea last year added five years to the sentence he was already serving. In March 1997, Donaldson pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to eight years in prison, plus an additional 12 years for violating his parole on aggravated robbery charges.

The attempted murder and involuntary manslaughter counts all deal with the beating of Deborah Nooks. In the second case, Donaldson was originally charged with murder.

In an opinion handed down Friday morning, the Ohio Second District Court of Appeals found that double jeopardy did not bar the state’s prosecution of the defendant for murder, noting that when he pleaded guilty to attempted murder in 1997, all parties agreed the state could bring additional charges should Nooks die from her injuries.

The court also found that Donaldson, as part of his guilty plea last year, had stipulated that he had acted with a separate animus, thus allowing the trial court to impose separate sentences for the two offenses, which otherwise might have merged for the purposes of sentencing.

“I’m just trying to get this over with, your honor,” Donaldson told Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Gregory F. Singer before the judge sentenced him Nov. 8, 2011.

Donaldson and Nooks were parolees who met in a halfway house in 1995. After Nooks tried to break up with him, he attacked her, including stomping her head with his boots. The attack left Nooks blind, brain damaged and only able to communicate by blinking her eyes. Nooks remained in nursing homes for the rest of her life.