Grace Huang with the children during happier times. Courtesy: Free Matt & Grace

Doha

A Qatari court said yesterday it would rule next month on a US couple's appeal of a jail sentence on charges of parental neglect leading to the death of their daughter.
A decision on the appeal is expected to be issued on November 30.
Matthew and Grace Huang were arrested in January 2013 after the death of their eight-year-old daughter Gloria, who was adopted from an orphanage in Ghana.
The couple, who are of Asian descent, were initially accused of starving to death their child to sell her organs but were later jailed for three years on reduced charges of parental neglect.
The couple from Los Angeles moved to Qatar with their three young children in 2012, after Matthew got a job with a construction firm in Doha.
The pair appeared on Monday in court, where a forensic pathologist testified and said Gloria's corpse showed signs that she had not eaten for days.
"I found no signs of food in her stomach and the whole intestine, and I found no other reasons for death," said the expert Anees Mahmud.
But the Huangs have insisted that Gloria died of an eating disorder rooted in a troubled early childhood.
The hearing was attended by a number of international and local journalists.
The couple were released in November last year pending trial, but the court denied their request to leave the country to join their other two adopted children in the United States.
Both adoption and multiracial families are rare in Qatar, and the family's supporters maintain Qatari authorities misunderstood the Huangs' situation.
The public prosecutor had pushed for the death penalty for the Huangs.
In addition to imprisonment, the court ordered the couple to pay a fine of QR15,000 each and to be deported after serving their sentence.
According to earlier reports, a US pathologist who examined Gloria’s body when it was returned home questioned the validity of the Qatar-based examiner’s report, saying he found no evidence that tissue samples had been removed from her brain or major organs in Qatar, meaning no analysis could have actually been performed.
Earlier this month, the US State Department had urged Qatar to lift the travel ban , so the Huangs could reunite with their two sons and urged Doha to bring the case to an expeditious and just conclusion.