Amish Mother Ruth Miller Back In Court as Legal Teams Debate Jury Guidance Ahead of March Murder Trial

Ruth Miller – the Amish mother facing aggravated murder, among other charges, in her four-year-old son’s August drowning death – was in court yesterday for a pre-trial hearing which lasted about a half-hour. Miller’s trial is scheduled to begin March 4th, so just about two months from now.

There was not a ton of headline-grabbing news made, though one important issue was addressed (and except for the last part – where I share something I noticed after seeing multiple court appearances by Ruth Miller – this post looks more at the legal side of the proceedings, so fair warning).

Annabelle Childers of WKYC 3 News related the main points learned (see video below). First, the purpose of the hearing was about jury instructions:

“The hearing was for both legal teams and the judge to decide the instructions that will be given to the jury and because of Ruth Miller’s insanity plea, when the trial begins in March, jurors will be tasked with determining wrongfulness.”

Miller has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in her four-year-old son Vincen’s death by drowning at an Ohio lake in late August 2025.

Law professor Michael Benza of Case Western Reserve University explained further how in approaching that question, instructions are set for the jury:

“The idea is that we try to give the jury the best explanation about what the burdens are, what the state of the law is, what are the requirements, so that they can then make the best decision that they can to decide whether or not, yes, this is a not guilty by reason of insanity case, or they reject that defense.” 

Agreeing & Disagreeing

Both sides, defense and prosecution, generally agreed on the definition of wrongfulness, as Childers relates:

“Both the defense and prosecution said there was a lot they agreed on in the definition of wrongfulness, and they agreed that subjective moral wrongfulness is not the standard in Ohio law. That means the focus in Ohio law is on legal or objective wrongfulness, not wrongfulness based on a defendant’s. Personal religious beliefs of morality.”

They did differ on a key point when it came to instructing the jury and experts:

“The prosecution wants the jury and forensic experts to be told that subjective moral wrongfulness is not the state legal standard, but the defense argued sharing that additional information with jurors and forensic experts is unnecessary and would be over instructing the parties involved.”

Why does this matter? As always my disclaimer is that I am a lay person and not legally versed, but it seems one important problem with over-instructing a jury is that it can cause jurors to be overwhelmed with too much information and may cause misunderstanding.

One legal firm also shares this on the risk of verdicts being reversed on appeal when juries are poorly instructed:

Improper jury instructions are one of the surest ways for a verdict to be reversed on appeal. Why?

Because unlike other issues that might be considered harmless error (some evidence that was excluded when it shouldn’t have been, an objection improperly overruled), stating the law incorrectly for the jury is almost never a harmless error.

The law assumes that juries faithfully apply the facts to the law they are given, so if they are given the wrong law, it is presumed it affected their deliberations, resulting in the need for a whole new trial.

And there may be more to it than that. But whatever the reason, it seems that Miller’s defense team sees this possibility of overinstruction as a potential risk for them in their case, wishing to leave jurors with fewer instructions and presumably take a more common-sense approach.

They’re also talking about not overinstructing the forensic experts as well. That point was argued by a lawyer for Miller, Lucas Trott, who had this to say:

“These professionals know how to do their job without the benefit of all this extra fluff. And they do it on a routine basis and it’s the same for juries, Your Honor. I mean juries reach verdicts on sanity cases all the time across the state of Ohio without an instruction like this.”

This is clearly an important matter to the defense, seeing that they differed with the prosecution in this point. The judge did not make a decision, but informed the parties that he would do so by the end of the week.

One more thing

One other, non legal-matter thing I noticed from this video: it doesn’t appear that Miller has any family or friends in the courtroom. As I understand it, pretrial hearings are generally open to the public, so you’d suppose they could be there. You often enough see Amish people showing up when members of their community have matters in court.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not blaming them if they don’t want to be there and appear on camera, it’s just something that struck me watching this one.

In fact I don’t recall ever seeing anyone that one might suppose to be family or from the Amish community in previous court appearances by Ruth Miller either. That said, there might be another seating area behind where the camera is positioned.

The full replay of the day’s proceedings can be found here:

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