POTTSVILLE, Pa. (AP) - An appeals court has upheld the life sentence given to a man convicted of fatally beating his neighbor with a cast-iron window weight during a burglary of the victim's eastern Pennsylvania home.

Twenty-year-old Jarvin Huggins of Mahanoy City claims he shouldn't have received a mandatory life prison term for his first-degree murder conviction, because he had a "mental age" of only 11 or 12 at the time of the April 2012 crime.The state Superior Court last week upheld the sentence imposed last May in Schuylkill County court for the murder of 48-year-old Gene Slavinsky.Huggins unsuccessfully argued that the U.S. Supreme Court's ban of mandatory life sentences for juveniles should apply to people who don't have an adult's mental capacity. He was 18 at the time of the killing.