After wrongfully serving nearly three decades in prison, Frank Gable aims to get justice from the corrupt police officers who framed him
EUGENE, OR – Oregon’s longest serving wrongfully convicted man, Frank Gable, in federal court today has sued the cops who allegedly framed him for what was the state’s most high-profile murder in modern history.
From the very first interrogation by police, and throughout his nearly three decades of wrongful imprisonment, Frank Gable insisted on his innocence. No physical evidence connected him to the crime. Almost every one of the alleged witnesses who implicated him at the time have recanted their testimony.
During their repeated and prolonged interrogations of Gable, police used coercive and abusive tactics, including at one point choking him until he passed out. When they could not coerce him into confessing, they fabricated evidence from the interrogation to wrongfully implicate him. They then coerced witnesses into falsely implicating him, including targeting, relentlessly pressuring, and threatening a vulnerable, teenage girl.
Police pressed on with their framing of Gable despite having good, early leads on the real murderer. These included a man who confessed to killing Michael Francke, and another notoriously violent criminal who matched the suspect’s description and was at the crime scene when the murder occurred.
Gable’s criminal conviction was first vacated in 2019. That decision was affirmed on appeal in 2022, and the criminal charges against him were finally dismissed last year.
Mr. Gable is represented by attorneys Rachel Brady, Renee Spence and Megan Pierce of Loevy & Loevy Attorneys Law. Loevy + Loevy is one of the nation’s largest civil rights law firms, and over the past decade has won more multi-million dollar jury verdicts than any other civil rights law firm in the country. A copy of the lawsuit, Frank Gable v. Frederick Ackom, et al., case #6:24-cv-01131-AA, is available here.
