PORTLAND — The state of Oregon has urged a federal appeals court to reverse a judge’s ruling that allowed the release of a man who served nearly 30 years for the killing of Oregon prisons chief Michael Francke.
The Oregonian/OregonLive reports the state contends Frank Gable, now 63, and his lawyers failed to meet the legal threshold for showing Gable didn’t commit the fatal stabbing in 1989.
Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Gutman on Monday argued that Gable has not produced any new “trustworthy eyewitness accounts” or critical physical evidence to undercut his conviction and that the alleged confession to the killing by another man was unreliable and appropriately excluded at trial.
Gable’s lawyers countered that Oregon’s U.S. Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta made the right call and his decision should stand.
In a ruling in April 2019, Acosta found that the state trial judge erroneously barred the man’s confession and that Gable’s lawyers at the time should have asserted his federal due process rights in light of that error.
Acosta ordered the state to release Gable or retry him in 90 days. The state released Gable in June 2019 and appealed Acosta’s decision.
Gable is on federal supervision, living with his wife in Kansas as the state’s appeal proceeds.
He had been serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole in the killing of Francke, 42, in Salem. Francke was the director of the Oregon Department of Corrections when he was attacked during a confrontation near his state-issued car outside the Dome Building, the agency’s headquarters.
Gable was arrested 15 months later after another man said he saw him stab Francke. The state argued at trial that Francke interrupted Gable as Gable burgled Francke’s car. A jury found Gable guilty of aggravated murder and he was sentenced in 1991.
