Kepler personally took on his mother's case, returned from his observatory at Linz multiple times to represent her, and wrote the surviving 128-page legal brief in his own hand. She was acquitted in October 1621 after fourteen months of formal trial proceedings and six years of accumulated accusations. The trial documents — including Kepler's brief and the prosecution's catalogue of complaints from neighbours — are some of the most complete surviving records of a 17th-century German witchcraft case. Katharina died six months after the acquittal, broken by the imprisonment. Galileo never wrote about her. The Catholic Church had limited authority in Lutheran Württemberg.