By Phil Stanford, Oregon Confidential
As you may have heard by now, the state of Oregon has finally come to its senses and agreed to pay Frank Gable, the patsy in the Michael Francke murder case, $2 million for keeping him locked up in a cage for thirty years for a crime he had absolutely nothing to do with.
The hold-up until quite recently has been the state’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, who through a willful misinterpretation of state law – even after the Ninth Circuit’s finding that every bit of evidence against him had been fabricated by prosecutors and state police – was demanding that before Gable could get a penny of what was owed him, he actually had to go to court again and prove his innocence.
Thankfully, Ellen’s out of the picture now and will be remembered, if at all, as someone who completely mistook her job as attorney general to be protecting the interests of the state’s law enforcement bureaucracy rather than those of its citizenry as a whole.
Under the new AG Dan Rayfield, who took over in January, the Justice Department has apparently been moving, both behind the scenes and most recently in public, to restore a bit of decency to its administration of the state’s wrongful compensation law. As a result, Frank Gable will now receive, at the rate of $65 thousand for each year he spent in prison, the nearly $2 million (the exact amount is $1,957,868) he’s entitled to.
Which sum, it will almost certainly turn out, will be just a fraction of what the state will owe him after the big bucks Chicago law firm of Loevy+Loevy, which is representing Gable in his civil suit, gets finished with them. According to something I saw on the internet the other day, they just got a $120 million judgement for two black kids who were railroaded by the Chicago cops for a murder they didn’t commit.
And this is where it could get really interesting, and not just because of the potentially huge amounts of money that might be involved, but because in the lawsuit which was filed last July, they’re charging the state police with a criminal conspiracy to deprive Gable of his constitutional rights.
And as anyone who’s been following this case already knows, they’ve got an excellent chance of winning because the official investigation of the Francke murder was crooked from the start.
As is now beyond dispute, Michael Francke was murdered the night before he was scheduled to appear before the senate judicial committee and expose the rats’ nest of serious criminal behavior he’d discovered in the Corrections Department.
Yet from the start, the Marion County DA’s office, the state police, and as we know now, the governor himself, Neil Goldschmidt, denied that he was doing anything of the sort. And furthermore, that there was no corruption to investigate in the first place.
When Michael Francke’s younger brother Kevin came forward to say that shortly before the murder Michael told him he’d discovered an “organized criminal element” within his department and would soon be “cleaning house,” their immediate response was to dismiss Kevin as either crazed by grief or an outright liar. Which, if you stop to think about it, didn’t make any sense at all because why would anyone want to sabotage or lead astray an investigation into his brother’s murder?Upgrade to paid
And in fact, as any honest investigation would have quickly discovered, Francke had told others the same thing – one of them, as you already know if you’ve been following this substack, being Mike Burton, who was then a member of the state legislature.
During the week before the murder Burton had traveled with Francke on an inspection tour of prisons in Eastern Oregon. On the drive back, as he clearly recalls, Francke told him he’d discovered serious corruption in his department and was scheduled to appear before the senate judicial committee and “blow the top off” everything.
As Francke also told Burton, he was keeping his findings on an NEC laptop computer that happened to be lying on the front seat between them. The computer never turned up among Francke’s belongings.
A week or so after the murder, once Burton realized that the official word from district attorney Dale Penn and the state police was that the murder was probably just a random car burglary gone bad, he went to the Penn’s office and told him about his conversation with Francke. If you find the computer, he told Penn, you’ll find the murderer. Penn nodded and said he’d get back to him, but he never did.
And the point of this story, of course, is not that Kevin was telling the truth, which he obviously was. The point is that Penn knew from early in the investigation that, yes indeed, there was a very good possibility, since Francke was himself a former prosecutor and judge and knew what he was talking about, that he was murdered to prevent him from exposing the corruption he’d discovered in Corrections.
In other words, as is now quite clear, Penn was lying his ass off from the beginning.
That was just their first big lie. The second, of course, was the phony case against Gable. Since they were obviously unwilling to even consider the possibility that Michael Francke was murdered to prevent him from exposing the official corruption he’d discovered, they needed a patsy, and Frank Gable was it.
As the Ninth Circuit has made clear, the DA’s office and the state police made up all the evidence against him. And then once they got their conviction, and knowing that their case was built entirely on lies, they asked for the death penalty – and they missed getting it by two votes.
So it’s truly a pity that, under law, DA’s and other prosecutors have immunity from civil suits like the one Loevy+Loevy is currently bringing on Gable’s behalf. But of course it was the state cops who, under Penn’s supervision, did most the dirty work, so somehow I think this will probably find its way into the trial.
If and when such a trial occurs, of course. Because much as I’d like to see it, I’m betting that once Rayfield and his minions at the AG’s office understand what they’re looking at here, they’ll settle in a New York – no make that Chicago – minute.