14 DAY TRIAL // Members of the Supreme Court have voted to uphold two reckless homicide convictions in the case of two parents who denied their daughter medical attention.
In 2008, Dale and Leilani Neumann's daughter Madeline Kara died after they used prayer as the only treatment for her.
11-year-old Madeline suffered from diabetes which went untreated. The parents only called an ambulance when the girls stopped breathing.
"We need agreement in prayer over our youngest daughter, who is very weak and pale at the moment with hardly any strength," Dale Neumann posted on a Christian site a day before Madeline died.
The high court decided that the girl's life could have easily been saved had they taken her to a doctor or called 911 sooner.
"If we were to adopt the parents' reasoning, no prayer-treating parent would know what point is beyond 'a substantial risk of death' until the child actually stopped breathing and died," Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson says, representing the majority of the judges ruling on the case.
While the law excludes spiritual healing as a form of child abuse and neglect, the convictions have been voted as viable by six out of seven judges. Justice David Prosser opposed the ruling, the Journal Sentinel writes.
The parents had previously argued that they were unaware of the fact that their daughter's condition was worsening to the point where she would be in "substantial risk of death."
"The Neumanns claim that the reckless homicide statute is too murky to give sufficient notice as to when parent choice of treatment through prayer becomes illegal. Given the nature of (her) illness as well as the imprecision in the statutory language, I agree. There is a due process problem here," Prosser said.
The family decided not to support traditional medicine when Dale Neumann, who had a bad back, stopped experiencing pain. He credited his "healing" to prayer.