Almost 34 years after Oregon Corrections chief Michael Francke died during a car break-in, it doesn’t matter who murdered him.
U.S. Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta made it official a couple of days ago: Frank Gable is the latest Prison Powerball winner. Not only has Francke’s killer been lavished with good wishes by the media and public, he will likely end up with more money than he ever made as a meth dealer and — best of all — Gable has had his virginity restored.
Acosta ordered Gable’s criminal record expunged.
Most Oregonians don’t know who Michael Francke was or what happened to him. His story is unusual because most victims of violent crime tend to come from the lower socio-economic classes. They are not high-ranking state bureaucrats.
Like many people, though, Francke drove a car. When he left his Salem office at the Department of Corrections about 7:30 p.m. Jan. 17, 1989 he found someone rifling through his state-issued vehicle.
Someone heard him yell, “Hey, what are you doing in my car?”
Francke later was found stabbed to death. Gable, a meth dealer with a long criminal history, was eventually convicted of murder by a jury.
Francke’s brothers, Michael and Kevin Francke, couldn’t believe their loved one was killed by a common thug.
What kind of world is it when a state prisons chief can be stabbed to death by a loser like Gable? It’s almost as unbelievable as the most powerful man in the world being shot dead in Texas by an emotionally disturbed nobody. Or the brother of the formerly most powerful man in the world shot, live on television, by a Palestinian horse groomer.
Francke’s brothers believed he was killed to silence him on the brink of revealing major corruption in the Department of Corrections. He had rankled his boss, then-Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, who had warned Francke in a memo: “There’s no room for more speeches about ‘We don't have a crime problem,’ or ‘Prisons won't help.’”
After the conspiracy theories started, Goldschmidt asked retired appellate judge John Warden to conduct an independent review. Warden found no connection between Francke’s murder and prison corruption.
But with moral support from the victim’s brothers and financial support from the public’s indigent defense fund, Gable filed one appeal after another.
Many states provide court-appointed legal assistance for an initial appeal, but Oregon is much more generous. It provides free lawyers at every stage of an appellate process, which can stretch to nine stages. (Remember that next time you hear still another story about how broke Oregon’s indigent fund is.)
Gable exhausted all his appeals in state court and then moved into federal court claiming his rights had been violated. He finally hit the jackpot with Judge Acosta, who threw out the murder conviction in 2019.
From a distance of 28 years after the original trial, Judge Acosta examined the claims made by Gable’s attorneys and essentially retried the case in his own mind.
He noted that eight material witnesses, who presumably had valuable information related to the case, now recanted their previous testimony for various reasons.
The judge also decided that the jury back in 1991 should have heard testimony that another man confessed to the crime, and Gable’s ineffective counsel didn’t pursue that angle.
Actually, there were at least two men who confessed to the crime. One of them was a 24-year-old Salem meth dealer named Timothy Natividad. There were numerous versions by various people as to how Natividad allegedly killed Francke.
Unfortunately, Natividad died two weeks after Francke’s murder when his wife shot him, claiming years of abuse. A jury acquitted her.
Natividad’s widow later married Francke’s brother, Kevin.
During Gable’s murder trial, he was caught having sex during a jail visit with one of his attorneys, representing him on an unrelated federal gun charge. They later married during a recess in his murder trial. (They are now divorced.) Is it any wonder some members of the media became obsessed by Gable’s story?
Now with Judge Acosta’s final ruling on May 12, ordering Gable’s criminal records completely expunged, he is no longer under federal supervision or at risk of retrial. He currently lives in Kansas.
It isn’t Gable’s full release that’s disturbing. After all, he did serve 30 years (even though the sentence was life without parole). What’s wrong is how Francke’s murder has become irrelevant. Too many parties seized on it for their own purposes. Now a federal magistrate judge thinks he can rewrite history by simply expunging Gable’s criminal record.
The conspiracy theories and Gable’s never-ending appeals kept the story alive.
To fully appreciate how solid the case against Gable was, visit The Oregonian archives on the Multnomah County Library’s website and read the May 22, 2005 stories by Les Zaitz and Noelle Crombie: “Facts Dispute Francke Conspiracy.” (A reminder of the deep research The O used to be capable of.)
The reporters traveled twice to Florida to interview Gable, interviewed 60 people and examined 90,000 pages of prosecution and defense records. Their conclusion:
“The results don’t help Gable. Witnesses he said would back up his alibi didn’t. Documents he said would prove his claims do otherwise. … The evidence establishes that Gable’s alibi remains largely a figment of his imagination. At the end of the final interview, even Gable admitted confusion about what he was doing that night.”
Will Oregonian Editor Therese Bottomly, who has been known to take to her knees to make amends, attempt to expunge these excellent stories from The O’s archives?
It’s doubtful Judge Acosta ever read them. News stories usually are not part of the legal record. They can offer insight, though, especially to those who work in dignified, well-guarded federal courtrooms, which are the opposite of chaotic, bloody crime scenes.
Acosta’s legal career didn’t include criminal law. He was a partner in Stoel Rives, the state’s largest law firm known for catering to “silk stocking” or well-to-do clientele. (Of course, they do some pro bono work. It looks good and probably provides tax write-offs.)
What does Acosta know of drug dealers, ex-cons, crime victims, cops? Does he understand the dirtbag culture and how messy it is, why people lie to police and then recant again and again? (At one point, Gable tried to pass himself off as a police informant.)
Here’s what the guilty know: It doesn’t matter whether they’re “actually innocent” or not. What does matter: Did they have their rights violated? Were the cops, investigators, prosecutors less than perfect?
In 1994, five years after Francke was murdered, the state’s voters passed Measure 11 requiring minimum-mandatory sentences for certain violent crimes in response to the rising crime rate and failure to adequately punish offenders.
Crime in Oregon started to drop, and the prison population went up. To be sure, crime was also dropping in other states — but many of those states also passed similar truth-in-sentencing or three-strikes laws.
By 2011, crime had fallen enough that then-Gov. John Kitzhaber appointed a Commission on Public Safety to explore how to get rid of Measure 11. Or, how to persuade ordinary citizens in Oregon that it would be safe to stop sending criminal offenders to prison.
The first meeting of Kitzhaber’s group laid out this storyline: Prosecutors have too much power, judges not enough power, and the people who voted for Measure 11 were afraid of crime that no longer exists.
Craig Prins, then-executive director of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, prepared charts and graphs designed to show that crime had decreased dramatically in Oregon and the nation, suggesting that this was primarily because there are fewer males ages 15 to 39.
But there was a bigger truth, and Prins revealed it when he showed off the drop in crime: “The poor and destitute … have received the benefit of this drop in crime,” he said.
Most legislators hadn’t personally benefited from this drop in crime. But the costs of incarceration bothered some of them. Prison did not conform to their progressive values. The concept of restorative justice did.
In the years following Kitzhaber’s public safety group, Prins would leave the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission to be replaced by a guy named by Mike Schmidt, who would continue to push for restorative justice.
There would be subsequent legislation gutting Measure 11, reducing punishment for crimes such as assault and robbery and removing juveniles accused of violent crimes from adult court.
And Mike Schmidt would go on to be elected Multnomah County District Attorney to preside over the mess that Portland has become.
It’s almost like a conspiracy.
Gotcher justice dangling right here. However, it does seem to be rather hardish on those of Asian descent. Oh, well. To make an omelette . . .Relief comes in many forms:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/20/california-person-of-color-torches-college-students-doesnt-even-get-probation-n1696934
The Alameda County chief prosecutor, Pamela Price, the first Person of Color™ to hold the position, upon taking office, pledged to “bring more racial equality to the office and overhaul the county’s justice system,” in addition to “ending over-criminalization of youth.”
Phil Sanford’s take was pretty persuasive to me. Maxine Bernstein’s reporting notes a good argument for Johnny Crouse being the killer: https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2019/04/stunning-ruling-in-30-year-old-murder-of-oregon-prisons-chief-hinged-on-legal-hurdle.html