DOHA, Qatar — Matthew and Grace Huang spend five hours a day on Skype home-schooling their two adopted sons, now living with Mrs. Huang’s mother back home in the United States. The Huangs are also using the Internet to connect with an American counselor, who is helping them attempt to repair their psyches after nearly a year of separate incarcerations in Qatar’s penal system.

Mostly they just wait in a rented apartment here, the capital of Qatar, a tiny, affluent Persian Gulf emirate with a mix of multiculturalism and Muslim orthodoxy, for the verdict, scheduled for Thursday, in a murder trial in which they are accused in the death of their adopted daughter by depriving her of food and water for four days.

The Huangs have asserted that they are innocent, victims of a gross miscarriage of justice. The daughter, Gloria, who was 8, had an eating disorder, a legacy of her impoverished childhood in Ghana, in which she would sometimes fast, binge-eat or steal food. Friends said she and the boys, who were also adopted from Africa, had seemed healthy and happy.

The precise cause of the child’s death has never been established. But the case has revealed what the Huangs and their lawyers and supporters have called deeply ingrained prejudices here about adoption and multiracial families, based on the presumption that the girl must have been abused.