Man exonerated in murder case seeks about $2.1M in compensation from state

Published 3:43 pm Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Frank Gable is seeking more than $2 million from the state of Oregon for his wrongful conviction in the 1989 killing of Oregon prison chief Michael Francke.

Chicago-based lawyers filed a petition on Gable’s behalf in court on Tuesday, seeking compensation for the 29 years and 81 days that Gable spent in prison for the crime.

A federal magistrate judge earlier this year granted Gable unconditional release from custody and barred the state from retrying him in the case after ordering Marion County to dismiss his murder indictment with prejudice, meaning the state can’t bring future charges against Gable.

Gable was released from Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas on June 28, 2019. He lives with his wife in Kansas and was last working for a concrete contractor. He has since changed his name to Franke J. Different Cloud, but used his former name in the legal petition, filed in Marion County Circuit Court.

Michael Francke, 42, bled to death from stab wounds and was found dead on the north porch of the Dome Building, where he worked in Salem. The door of his nearby state-issued Pontiac stood open.

Gable, a local methamphetamine dealer at the time, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the murder in 1991.

U.S. Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta threw out Gable’s conviction in 2019, ruling that he didn’t get a fair trial. Acosta noted that another man’s confession to the crime was excluded during Gable’s trial.

Acosta found that no reasonable juror would have convicted Gable in light of another man’s multiple confessions to Francke’s killing and because nearly all the witnesses in the case had recanted their testimony since the trial.

“Mr. Gable was wrongly convicted and had almost 30 years taken away from him,” said Megan Pierce, one of Gable’s lawyers. “This is just a small step to hopefully correct the wrongs that were done and to get him a small amount of justice.”

His lawyers also are seeking a “certificate of innocence finding” that Gable is innocent of all crimes, according to the petition.

Under Oregon law, individuals are entitled to compensation if they can show by a preponderance of evidence that they were convicted of one or more felonies and then imprisoned, that the conviction was later reversed, thrown out or the charges were dismissed, that they didn’t commit the crimes and weren’t an accessory to the crimes and that they did not commit perjury, fabricate evidence or cause the conviction.

Gable’s petition seeks $1,957,868 in state compensation, based on an established rate of $67,000 per year that he was in custody, to be paid in a lump sum.

In addition, he’s seeking another $104,048.22 to be paid as compensation for the four years and 12 days he served on post-prison supervision, for a total of $2,061,916.22.