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Frank Gable, pictured in 1990 at the Marion County Courthouse.

(File photo)

By John Foote

In 1989, the director of the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) was stabbed to death on the grounds of the DOC central office. As many of us painfully remember, it took a full year of investigation before there was enough evidence to charge, try and convict the murderer, Frank Gable.

What made that year of waiting so painful was the way so many innocent DOC employees were dragged through the mud with baseless accusations of a conspiracy which did not exist.

Now, more than 26 years later, a privately funded organization that has anointed themselves with the grand title of the Oregon Innocence Project has decided to claim that Gable is innocent.

Over our nation's long history, the American public has developed a healthy skepticism about the actions of special interest groups. Although sometimes they can be a healthy counterpoint to accepted doctrines, to the general public they are most often cloaked in shadowy self-interest or their rhetoric is ideologically shrill. Unfortunately, the Oregon Innocence Project has gotten off to just such a start. The group is privately funded with no public accountability. And their rhetoric can be mindlessly harsh.

The leader of the Oregon Innocence Project, a retired chief federal public defender, after defending al-Qaida detainees at Guantanamo Bay, wrote a book capturing his thoughts on our justice system with the title "Kafka Comes to America."

Under his leadership, the Oregon Innocence Project has been continuously grasping for the perfect case to prove their claims of a corrupt and venal criminal justice system. So far, their work has been largely fruitless, despite their repeated efforts to comb through case after case.

And this is where Frank Gable comes in. After repeatedly failing to uncover a trove of innocent inmates living in our prisons, the Oregon Innocence Project has gone down the well-worn path that leads to the man in 1989 who stabbed to death Michael Francke, the director of Oregon's Department of Corrections.

The Gable case was one of the most investigated and publicly scrutinized cases in Oregon history. It was fully litigated throughout a jury trial and many years of appeals and other legal challenges. Over many years of painstaking legal procedures, all of Gable's legal rights were honored and protected at considerable public expense. And during that process not even one juror, trial judge or appellate judge was persuaded that he was innocent. And all of this occurred under the glare of a media spotlight without precedent.

As the inspector general of Oregon's prison system from 1990-1995, I was given the responsibility for investigating allegations of wrongdoing in the department, including some of the conspiracy theories that arose after the Francke murder. Starting in 1989, competing media outlets spawned an escalating feeding frenzy of factually unsupported accusations against any number of public officials, including even an accusation involving a murder-for-hire theory. None of these wild accusations ever held water, but they hurt a great many truly innocent people. Through it all, the only case that withstood the scrutiny of our court system, over and over, was the one presented in open court to a jury of 12 citizens and repeatedly affirmed by all of Oregon's appellate courts.

Michael Francke was stabbed to death by Frank Gable, a low-level thief, thug and drug dealer, after Francke happened to stumble upon him breaking into his car.

The true Gable case was simply too mundane for the press to accept at face value in 1989. Today the case is just too sensational for the Oregon Innocence Project to pass up the opportunity to resurrect, particularly after their other efforts have so far failed to smear Oregon's criminal justice system as the "Kafkaesque" nightmare they believe it to be.

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John Foote is Clackamas County district attorney.