Monday, Feb. 27, 1984
Making Sure
Nevada won't trust California
The contest between prosecutors in California and neighboring Nevada is grim, but the two states have a common goal: they want to make certain that Gerald Gallego will die. A jury in California's Sacramento County last May convicted Gallego, 37, a former truck driver, of kidnaping a college couple, raping the woman and then killing both students. Gallego, whose father Gerald was executed in Mississippi in 1955 after a murder conviction, was sentenced to die. Says James Morris, the chief prosecutor: "He's a chip off the old block."
Prosecutors in Nevada's Pershing County, a largely desert area with only 3,500 residents, are not sure that California will ever send Gallego to the gas chamber. So they have charged him with the rape and murder of four teen-age girls in their county. The trial may cost $60,000, which the county, its budget already in the red, cannot afford. But residents of both Nevada and California are contributing to a prosecution fund. So far, about $2,500 has been donated. Says Pershing County District Attorney Richard Wagner: "California has a very liberal state supreme court. There are very few people who feel that the death penalty would be carried out there."
California prosecutors agree. In the past three years the California Supreme Court has ordered retrials in 18 of the 20 appeals of death sentences that it has received. Says Prosecutor Morris: "If anyone ever deserved to be executed, it's Gallego."