When Kenneth Neal went on trial for the murder of his estranged girlfriend in 1996, he was not the only person in the courtroom recently accused of a crime. His court-appointed defense attorney was a convicted child pornographer whose fall from grace had been widely publicized in the same rural county just a few years before Kenneth’s trial. The poor defense Kenneth received was likely the reason he spent 19 years on death row, despite having an IQ of 69. He was finally resentenced to life without parole in 2015 because of his intellectual disability.
Kenneth was convicted in the 1995 killing of Amanda McCurdy, his longtime girlfriend and the mother of his child. She had recently asked Kenneth to move out of the home they shared, and Kenneth was unable to cope with the loss of his relationship, home, and child. One of 11 children of a tenant farmer, Kenneth grew up in extreme poverty and dropped out of school before completing ninth grade. He couldn’t afford an attorney, so the court assigned him Douglas Osborne.
Osborne was a notorious figure. In 1989, while an assistant district attorney, he was caught in a federal sting and convicted of buying sex tapes involving children as young as seven. The tapes portrayed incestuous sex between siblings and their parents. His arrest received more publicity than most, because he was a prosecutor and came from a well-known Rockingham County family. In the months between his arrest and trial, Osborne was the subject of multiple front-page stories in local newspapers, which followed the case from the initial charges all the way through to conviction.
Osborne spent a year in federal prison and had his law license suspended for five years. He finished probation and regained his law license just a year before Kenneth’s trial. During the trial, his attorney failed to present evidence that could have spared Kenneth a death sentence, including his low IQ, extreme poverty, and history of family violence. No experts testified to his intellectual disability, and the only testimony about Kenneth’s mental health came from a psychologist not licensed to practice in the United States without supervision.
Interviews with jurors after the trial proved that they knew about Osborne’s crimes and discussed them as they were weighing Kenneth’s fate. One juror said the attorney’s conviction was “the most disgusting type of crime there is” and that Kenneth “could not have done worse” than to have Douglas Osborne as his attorney.
North Carolina still has the death penalty, a
