State mailroom mixup delays appeal in ‘sex-slave’ killer’s case

Tuesday, March 3, 1998 | 10:15 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- A mixup in the state mailing system has resulted in Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa missing the deadline to file an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Gerald Gallego, now on death row.

Del Papa said Monday her office delivered the state's petition for a writ of certiorari to the state's mailroom on Friday, Feb. 13, a tthree-day holidya weekend, for dispatch by first-class mail to the U.S. Supreme Court. The deadline for filing withthe court was Tuesday, Feb. 17.

Supreme Court rules say documents are considered filed on time if they are sent first-class mail bearing a postmark of the last day of filing. But the boxes of petitions were sent by United Parcel Service instead of first-class mail.

The state's petition didn't get to the Supreme Court until Feb. 24. Del Papa said her office has filed for an extension of time on grounds the delay was out of the hands of her office.

Mike Meizel, director of the state Division of Buildings and Grounds, said state agencies were notified last summer that boxes delivered to the mail room would go UPS rather than first-class mail, unless specifically marked UPS, Meizel said, which is cheaper than first- clasmail. The boxes from the attorney general's office were not marked to be sent first-class mail, he said, so they were shipped by UPS.

"It's nobody's fault. It's just one of those screw-ups," Meizel said.

If the boxes had been designed as first-class mail, Meizel said the state could have postmarked them on Feb. 13.

Gallego, the "sex-slave killer," was convicted in June 1984 of the murders of 17-year-olds Karen Twiggs and Stacey Redican, whose bodies were found in the desert near Lovelock. He was sentenced to death.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Gallego was entitled to a new penalty hearing because the jury was not adequately informed if it was necessary to sentence him to death to ensure that he could not be released after serving only a relatively brief period of time in prison.

Gallego had picked the two girls up in Sacramento, Calif., seeking to find the perfect "sex slave." He also has been sentenced to death by a California court for the November 1980 murders of Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers.