After a long, tense week of deliberations, an Oregon jury found faith-healing Followers of Christ Carl and Raylene Worthington not guilty of the more serious criminal charge of manslaughter in the March 2008 death of their 15-month-old daughter Ava. Only Carl is guilty of the misdemeanor criminal mistreatment. He faces (though it's considered highly unlikely) a maximum of one year in jail for letting his daughter die at home of eminently treatable pneumonia while church members prayed over girl and anointed her with oil.

The case was the meant to be a test of Oregon's newer, stronger statute specifically prohibiting the use of faith healing as a defense, which was passed in 1999 after another child in the Followers of Christ church died of diabetes.

In fact, the new law may have saved the couple from serious jail time. Rather than use a defense claiming that they thought their prayers would save Ava, their defense was that they didn't think she was all that sick, effectively skirting the question "But would you have taken her to a doctor even if you had thought she was in mortal danger?"

Weeks of closely watched testimony depicted two images of Ava—was she a happy, healthy girl with a stuffy nose who appeared to be improving when she suddenly died, or a frail, malnourished child, deformed, disfigured, and debilitated by a softball-sized cyst on her neck, which made it difficult to breathe (among other things)?

We'll never know the truth, but most trial observers were outraged by the verdict.

Shocking.

It's incredible what you can get away with as long as you claim Jesus told you to.

Monsters.

...is typical of the 250-and-counting comments on The Oregonian's website.

But the jury (and most rational observers) believed that the parents really and truly cared about their daughter, while disagreeing with them vehemently about how to best care for children.

It seems obvious that the Followers of Christ people are deluded about the effectiveness of their "treatments"—Ava had a newborn baby brother die a few years ago after (or during) a home birth, and Raylene Worthington's parents are facing a January trial for the death of their 16-year-old son who, prosecuters say, died of an untreated urinary tract infection. (Really, how could God be in favor of that? He could have died simply of the pain. If you've never had an UTI, consider yourself blessed.)

But how do you make law in a case like this? If you're allowed to practice a faith-healing religion at all, at what point does not taking your kid to the hospital go from stupid to sinister? And before you say you'd never do such a thing—what about that growing number of parents who don't believe in vaccinating their kids? If those children die of measles, should their parents go to jail? What about giving your baby honey (some think it could be deadly) or raw milk (possibly diseased)? What about failing to child-proof every nook and cranny?

Unfortunately, for Ava especially, some people are going to be born into families with nutty ideas. And sometimes those nutty ideas can have awful consequences. It's pretty clear that this won't be the last time a child dies because of its parents' poor choices. And, sadly, but rightly, there's not too much the law can do about it.