Monday, August 3, 2026

August 3: Frank Gable: Oregon: (Coercive investigative techniques lead to a trail of recanting witnesses): Major (Welcome) Development: A judge has signed a certificate of innocence for Frank Gable, who was released from prison in 2019 after more than 29 years in custody, noting that no reasonable juror would have convicted Gable in light of another man’s multiple confessions to (Oregon Corrections Director Michael) Francke’s fatal stabbing - and because nearly all the witnesses in the case had recanted their testimony since the trial."



BACKGROUND: From a previous post of this Blog:  (March 22, 2025):  "On September 29, 2022, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the new trial ruling. The appeals court noted, “The facts on appeal are extraordinary. Since trial, nearly all the witnesses who directly implicated Gable have recanted. Many explain they intended to frame Gable because he was a police informant. They attribute their false testimony to significant investigative misconduct, which the State – remarkably – does not dispute.” “What we now know, and the jury did not, is that the testimony of the State’s main witnesses was irreversibly tainted by coercive investigative techniques, and that another man gave compelling confessions on multiple occasions,” the appeals court declared. The court painstakingly detailed the recantations and concluded that in the aftermath, the only prosecution witness left was Linda Perkins, who said that the morning after the murder, Gable said he had done something bad. However, the court noted that two people who were present during that conversation had said Perkins was not truthful. One of those two, Randy Studer, said that he, too, had been questioned by police, said he knew nothing. But after he was repeatedly polygraphed and interrogated, he agreed to falsely accuse Gable before the grand jury. Studer had recanted prior to the trial, did not testify and “to this day maintains that Perkins made up her story,” the appeals court said."


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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Last year, the state offered to pay nearly $2 million plus attorney fees to Gable to settle his wrongful conviction lawsuit against Oregon. Gable and his lawyers, though, have argued in court for additional compensation for the nearly four years that Gable was on supervised release while the state appealed the federal judge’s ruling to dismiss his murder conviction. Gable has a separate federal lawsuit pending against 24 police officers, claiming their improper tactics led to his wrongful conviction in the killing of Oregon’s prisons chief."

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STORY: "Judge signs certificate of innocence for Frank Gable after murder conviction thrown out," by Maxine Bernstein, published by The Oregonian, on July  30, 2026.  (Maxine Bernstein covers federal court, law enforcement and criminal justice issues after spending two decades covering Portland police. She joined The Oregonian in 1998 after a seven-year stint working for The Hartford Courant. She graduated from Cornell University, where she majored in history.)

GIST: "A Marion County judge on Thursday signed a certificate of innocence for Frank Gable, who was released from prison in 2019 after more than 29 years in custody.

A federal magistrate judge in 2019 threw out Gable’s murder conviction in the 1989 killing of Oregon Corrections Director Michael Francke. In 1991, Gable had been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The federal judge found that no reasonable juror would have convicted Gable in light of another man’s multiple confessions to Francke’s fatal stabbing and because nearly all the witnesses in the case had recanted their testimony since the trial. The decision was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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.

On Thursday, Marion County Circuit Judge Manuel Perez granted the certificate of innocence to Gable, finding that he had established by a preponderance of evidence that he is innocent “of all crimes for which he was wrongly convicted.”

The certificate was filed in a pending civil case.

Lawyers for the state informed the judge that the state took no position on Gable’s motion for the innocence certificate. The state, however, does oppose Gable’s motion for added compensation for the period he was on federal supervised release.

Last year, the state offered to pay nearly $2 million plus attorney fees to Gable to settle his wrongful conviction lawsuit against Oregon. Gable and his lawyers, though, have argued in court for additional compensation for the nearly four years that Gable was on supervised release while the state appealed the federal judge’s ruling to dismiss his murder conviction.

Gable has a separate federal lawsuit pending against 24 police officers, claiming their improper tactics led to his wrongful conviction in the killing of Oregon’s prisons chief.

Gable, now 67, lives in Kansas. He was released from Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas on June 28, 2019."

The entire story can be read at:


PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

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