Scheduled re-hearing of penalty phase postponed

Tuesday, Jan. 5, 1999 | 4:10 a.m.

The judge appointed to preside over the re-hearing of Gallego's death penalty has delayed that phase of the case to determine whether Gallego is competent to assist his attorney.

It had been scheduled to begin Monday.

Gallego also has a motion pending to fire a court-appointed lawyer and represent himself in the procedure, Pershing County District Attorney Belinda Quilici said Tuesday.

Gallego, 52, was convicted here in 1984 for the killings of Karen Twiggs and Stacey Redican. The two young women disappeared from a Sacramento shopping mall in April 1980. Their bodies were found three months later in a remote Pershing County canyon.

During his trial, his accomplice, Charlene Williams, testified Gallego was looking for "the perfect sex slave" during a murder odyssey between 1978 and 1980.

Gallego is also on Death Row in California, where he was convicted of the November 1980 murders of a Sacramento-area couple.

In the Nevada case, state and federal courts have rejected numerous appeals filed by Gallego.

In 1993, U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben rejected a petition in which Gallego raised 40 claims for relief.

That ruling was appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which last year upheld McKibben on all grounds but one.

The appellate court determined Gallego was entitled to a new sentencing hearing because jurors were given improper instructions regarding the possibility of his eventually being pardoned for the crimes.

In February, the Nevada Attorney General's Office sought to have Gallego's death sentence reinstated. But its petition arrived late at the U.S. Supreme Court when an employee in the state mail room sent the package of legal filings by United Parcel Service instead of first-class mail, and the court refused to consider the matter.

Next week's scheduled re-hearing, ordered by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, was postponed by District Judge John McGroarty of Las Vegas on Nov. 3 to allow for a competency evaluation at Lake's Crossing Center for the Mentally Disordered Offender in Reno.

McKibben then extended the time limit for the new sentencing hearing by 180 days, to July 1999.