Death-penalty mixup delays killer's sentencing

While Kevin Osborne pleaded guilty to two unrelated murders and agreed to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance for freedom, apparently not everyone was in agreement with the sentence.

While the 25-year-old defendant, his attorney, the prosecutor and the judge understood that was going to be the sentence, the state Parole and Probation Department on Monday inadvertently recommended the death penalty.

District Judge Kathy Hardcastle postponed the sentencing hearing until April 12 to give the department a chance to bring its recommendation in line with the plea bargain.

The Parole and Probation Department is required to submit pre-sentence reports even in murder cases where the sentence is set through a plea bargain or by a jury after a trial. In either case, the required recommendation virtually always mirrors the ultimate penalty.

Osborne will now have another week in the Clark County Detention Center before he will be shipped off to a state prison.

The prison setting will be all too familiar to Osborne, who already has spent six years in a Wyoming prison on drug charges. He was on the streets only nine months before murdering two men in Clark County -- both related to his chronic methamphetamine abuse, according to Deputy Special Public Defender Peter LaPorta.

Osborne even had a bad attitude when he was in prison. Deputy District Attorney David Schwartz noted that Osborne violated his probation in Wyoming in 1991 and disciplinary problems behind bars kept him from ever winning parole. He served out his entire sentence on a charge of conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance.

Prophetically, a prison report before his release concluded his "relapse potential is high."

The case in Hardcastle's courtroom involved the January 1998 shooting death of a fellow drug abuser who fell asleep after a three-day binge before he could complete a deal to buy more methamphetamine for Osborne.

Osborne told police he shot Chris Defreece twice in the head because he would not wake up and then dumped the body in an isolated desert area near Henderson.

Osborne also pleaded guilty in District Judge Donald Mosley's courtroom to the December 1997 stabbing death of his roommate, Gregory Ranstead, over a drug debt.

LaPorta said Osborne is alleged to have been attempting to collect money he was owed for drugs when an argument escalated into the fatal altercation.

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