BISMARCK, N.D. (KFGO) – The North Dakota Supreme Court has rejected a sentence reduction request by a North Dakota man convicted in a quadruple murder.
Michael Neugebauer was a teen when he shot and killed his parents, brother, and sister in 1992. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Neugebauer requested the reduction based on a 2017 law which allows the court to reduce a term of imprisonment imposed on a defendant convicted as an adult for an offense committed before the defendant was eighteen years of age.
The ruling by the state’s high court agreed with a state district court judge who ruled last year in a 22-page order that the law went into effect decades after Neugebauer’s sentence was handed down and can’t be applied retroactively.
Neugebauer shot each of his victims at least two times at the family’s Menoken-area home east of Bismarck on January 26, 1992. He was 15 years-old at the time.
Neugebauer’s case was charged in adult court.
Neugebauer testified at a hearing last March that he tolerated years of abuse before he shot his father and then entered a sort of tunnel vision in which he shot the three other family members.
“I couldn’t stay in that situation,” he testified.
