Frank Gable, who was wrongly convicted of murdering Oregon Corrections Director Michael Francke in 1991, is preparing to sue Marion County and the State of Oregon for violating his civil rights.

But, even if Gable wins a sizable judgement, he told the Portland Tribune that nothing can replace the 30 years that he served in prison before his conviction was overturned in federal court.

“I went into prison a young, cocky man and came out an old man with health problems,” Gable told the Portland Tribune in his first on-the-record interview since being released in 2019 while the Oregon Department of Justice appeal the federal ruling. “Nothing can give me those years back.”

Gable spoke while waiting to receive and review the final version of his upcoming suit being prepared by Lovey & Lovey, a Chicago law firm with a record of winning large judgements for those wrongfully convicted of crimes. Gable said they have not yet decided how much money to seek, but has been told that $1 million for every year in prison is not out of the question.

Gable said that after he was first convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, he fantasized that his sentence would be quickly overturned on appeal and that he would quickly be compensated. But as the years drug by and the state courts upheld his conviction, Gable lost hope. He had to exhaust all of his state appeals before federal public defenders in Portland took and reinvestigated his case, eventually discovering the alibi Gable had forgotten that helped set him free.

“If you’re guilty and you’re in prison, you think maybe you can get out on a technicality. But if you’re innocent, you don’t understand how it could have happened,” Gable said.

According to four federal judges, Gable was wrongly convicted because investigators and prosecutors manufactured evidence against him. They coerced petty criminals in Salem to lie and say they either saw Gable kill Francke outside the Corrections Department headquarters in 1989 or heard him admit doing it. Virtually every witness recanted their testimony by the time Oregon U.S. District Court Judge John Acosta first ruled that Gable was wrongly convicted in 2019.

Acosta’s ruling was upheld by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which wrote, ““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 after hearing he was a police informant. They attribute their false testimony to significant investigative misconduct, which the State — remarkably — does not dispute.”

Despite that, the Oregon Department of Justice appealed Acosta’s ruling all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. That sent the case back to Acosta, who dismissed the 1990 Marion County grand jury indictment against Gable “with prejudice” on May 8 of this year. Acosta also ordered that the State of Oregon and all of its political subdivisions are barred from rearresting, reindicting, or retrying Gable for Francke’s murder.

“If I did it, I could say I did it now and nobody could do anything about it. But I didn’t do it, I’ve always said I didn’t do it, and it still cost me 30 years of my life,” Gable said.

Since he was released, Gable has been living with his wife Rain in Kansas, where he has worked off and on and stayed out of trouble. Despite the stability, Gable told the Portland Tribune he struggles with his feelings over what happened to him almost every day.

“People might think he’s out, he’s free, he must be happy. But I saw so many bad things in prison. I saw people shot, stabbed, murdered right in front of me. I have dreams about being back in prison or being killed in prison every week. Sometimes I’m angry about the people who testified against me, but other times I can’t blame them because I know the pressure they were under,” Gable said.

Former Oregonian and Portland Tribune columnist Phil Stanford has written extensive about the case from the start. In 2019 he chronicled how Gable was framed in a free podcast titled “Murder in Oregon: Who Killed Michael Francke?” with Francke’s brothers, Kevin and Patrick, who always believed Gable was innocent. Now he is writing about it again in a free Substack column titled “Oregon Confidential.”

Gable said he has no interest listening to the podcast or reading the column, however.

“Why would I want to relive the worst years of my life,” Gable said.

Stanford and the Francke brothers have long believed Michael was murdered by corrupt corrections officials who feared he was going to expose them. Asked if he has any theories about why Michael was killed, Gable said, “I have no idea.”

Gable also thanked those who believed he was innocent, including Stanford and the Francke brothers. And he praised the federal public defenders who won his exoneration.