State urges appeals court to uphold trial judge: excluded expert testimony and speculative causation

Assistant Attorney General Julie Charlie told the court the trial judge properly excluded parts of expert Robert Thornton's testimony because he did not show his experience was comparable to DOC hearings practice in Washington. Charlie said Thornton "only testified as to what he personally would have done, not what a DOC hearings officer would have done," and that the record therefore lacked the necessary comparability.

The state further argued that connecting DOC's conduct to Miller's incarceration on the day of the murder would require jurors to make a chain of speculative inferences. Charlie said the state's proximate-cause theory involved multiple steps that the jury would need to speculate about and that those speculative leaps justified granting the CR 50 motion.