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my name is um Frank Thompson born in Arkansas educated in Arkansas when I grew up it was of course the
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segregated South but I was quite fortunate I was raised in a very loving family my parents were together
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we were involved in the church so we had our social Outlets through our church we
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were brought up in a very cohesive black community and quite frankly I think I really became
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alive on a social social issue setting when Emmett Till was killed in 1955 Emmett Till was visiting family
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in Mississippi when a white woman accused him of whistling at her in her family's grocery store and making sexual
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advances a few nights later the woman's husband and his half-brother kidnapped tortured
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and Shot 14 year old Emmett Till they tied a 75-pound industrial fan around his neck and through his body
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into a river a month later both men were acquitted by an all-white jury Frank Thompson remembers it well he was
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13 years old just a year younger than Emmett Till oh boy you know every mother every father
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related to having lost a child that's one level uh even though there had been lynchings
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all across the South Emmett Till's death just sort of punctuated the sensitivities to where
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even though Christians are against uh killing I came up in a a church where many of
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the black Christians felt that capital punishment was a an appropriate social sanction against
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those who would kill as they killed Emmett Till because every black felt it I mean there
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was no youngster that would walk the street that felt like at any moment you might be strung up for a reason let me
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give you an example I can remember the within three weeks of Emmett's death I got on a bus
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which was segregated where I was required to sit in the back of the bus and I can almost sense right now as I'm
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talking to you that feeling I had when I got on the bus I was walking down this aisle
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looking at the ceiling of the bus or looking at the floor of the bus because I did not want to inadvertently
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look in the eyes of some white woman and be accused of flirting I'll never forget that feeling I didn't
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have the freedom of looking where I felt I didn't have the freedom of looking where I felt like I wanted to look
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on a public bus because somebody might say I winked at a white woman that's how Emmett Till's murder began to
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affect my psyche about racism in the south so that was the beginning quite frankly
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of my accepting capital punishment as being something that should be administered against
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those who were so guilty of acts as was perpetrated against Emmett Till [Music] since Job to learn how to perform an
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execution step by step and how to identify which of his colleagues were best suited to help him
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do it I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music] Frank Thompson went to college to study
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medicine but left school to serve in the army during the Vietnam war he was a military police officer
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he returned to Arkansas finished college and got a job with the Arkansas Department of Corrections
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Arkansas has been a capital punishment state for quite some time and a number of executions took place I was
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never apart of an execution directly personally but whenever executions took place in
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Arkansas all institutions would be put on alert and we would go into an operation mode of reduced
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activities higher control activities uh monitoring and make behaviors monitoring inmate associations trying to
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get a feel for the pulse of the institutions regardless of where we were located and you never know how the
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execution of One inmate might affect the quiet the uh atmosphere and any institution males
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are very very important to the inmate population they'll inmates will go off even if there is not an execution taking
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place but this is a period of time you don't want to put out a bad meal so particular attention is paid to those
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kinds of subtleties those kinds of things that you and I take for granted in the Free World are
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exponentially more important to the inmate population while locked up behind the bars and the
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walls he was promoted to Warden and stayed in Arkansas for five years before interviewing for a job in 1994 as the
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superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary they did tell me Frank you do know that
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you are applying for a job in Oregon where there's capital punishment and I told him I did
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and they said uh there's a chance you might have to execute somebody before it's all over
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here and uh they asked me did I think I could carry out my duties and without hesitation I told them that I could I'm
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a good soldier I can I can do my job and the reason I was able to say that um in the military I was trained to take
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life if I had to at the same time I was asked that question Oregon had not had an execution in over
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32 years foreign [Music] after you started the job did you find out that you would need to execute
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someone I think it was about 18 months I could deliver this death warrant from the governor's office
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and all of a sudden I am responsible for taking the life of a human being in the name of the public and it had been
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30 years yeah I mean you tell me about it that's exactly how I felt I'm saying I'm just getting here
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the last execution in the state had been in 1962 when Oregon was still using a gas chamber
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since then the laws had changed requiring executions to be performed by lethal injection but no one in the state
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had ever done one before so that meant that I had to go in and rewrite the protocols for a lethal
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injection execution I had to train the staff including myself there was no one who had been an
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executioner I had to go out and identify someone who was willing to be confidentially identified and
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performed the execution if I had come to Oregon and they had done two or three executions within the past two or three
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years I would have called my team together and say okay folk let's get in here and let's get this thing done how
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let's get the rule book out how did it go to the last time what are the protocols and I would have had a team of
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people there to help me pull this off and if that had been the case I imagine I could have
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gone through two three four five executions without it bothering me nearly as soon or nearly as profoundly
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as it did in having to conduct the first execution for the first time how do you even go about writing
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protocols for something you've never seen before where do you go where do you turn you go
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and watch somebody get executed a key number of us flew to San Quentin and we witnessed an
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execution um I flew a colleague of mine from Arkansas to teach me how to administer the lethal fluids so
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that I could train the Executioner here in Oregon how to administer the same process
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you go to Texas until Texas to send me your protocols and we didn't want to deviate because
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Texas was conducting executions quicker and faster than any other state in the country and if we were ever
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question about how did you come up with your protocol Frank one of the first things I'd be able to tell them well we
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went to a state that had a history of conducting executions and we use that protocols so quite frankly we pulled
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from the experiences of primarily Texas and Arkansas to build the protocols for Oregon
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do you remember having conversations with people when you were trying to recruit those to help you with the
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execution people saying I I just can't I'm sorry I don't I don't think I can handle that
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that was probably one of the more challenging tasks I had to perform um is trying to
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know who to choose to put on the team that was going to have to take the life of a human being for the
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first time in any of their lives because I had been in the military and I had been trained
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to take life and I decided to recruit those who had military experience so I told my assistant superintendent to
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comb the Staffing pattern to come up with the names of as many veterans we had on staff
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by definition of the fact that they were veterans I know they had fired a weapon
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by definition I know that they have gone through the emotional and psychological
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process of contemplating and thinking about what learning how to fire a weapon meant that
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they had dealt with this whole notion on some level of killing somebody so the well-being of my staff and some
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people think this is that makes sense but the well-being of my staff actually loomed larger in
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getting this execution process together larger than my immediate concern about the person who was to be
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executed his Destiny was set by law he was going to be executed in my job to be sure that he was executed as humanely
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and as painlessly as possible and I knew that if I could get my staff through this
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the rest would fall of course as as planned once you had your team assembled did you
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practice or rehearse exactly what because of course in fact we rehearsed over and over and over and
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I got that from the military I wanted my staff to be able to perform their tasks detached
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from the emotions that could become involved in fact that was one time I asked them to strap me on the Gurdy
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essay see they normally would Struck One Another they would take roles and they would assume the position of the inmate
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on the gurney and they would tie themselves down or each other down and during one exercise I asked them
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to use me as the surrogate inmate to put their minds at ease that I was with them
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and I will say to you this when it came time for them to unstrap me I was never so glad to get up off my
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back as any time I could remember in my life and the hour date and time I don't know
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but I can remember saying to my assistant superintendent man I you know this is not
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this is not what the state ought to be doing and so I began sharing with key people
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and it was through that meticulous and detail I was sitting in a room with a guy that had
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been chosen to be the Executioner the one true depressed the plunger into the strange
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sending the lethal fluid into the vein of the guy on the gurney and I'm sitting in this room with a
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bucket we were both sitting on stools with a bucket sitting between us and I'm drawing the water into the syringe
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and I'm instructing him to depress the plunger at a rate that it is not propelled
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out of the needle but at a rate almost equal to that being drawn by the force of gravity
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so where it just sort of flows out and it's not propelled as I was saying those kinds of things to him
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I remember that inner feeling that this just doesn't feel right [Music] leading up to Oregon's first execution
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in more than 30 years superintendent Frank Thompson and his staff simulated the process from start
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to finish bringing in Witnesses and seating them in the gallery simulating the phone call
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from the governor's office to let them know that there is no stay of execution they practice interacting with the press
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and informing them of time of death and how long it took for the inmate to die but
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Frank says he was also talking with members of his staff about his reservations and making sure that they knew that they
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didn't have to be involved if they didn't want to he says no one backed out and in September of 1996 Douglas
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Franklin Wright was the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the state of Oregon
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Wright had confessed to murdering four homeless men after promising them jobs he didn't appeal his death sentence
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he indicated to us that these straps to his wrist were hurting him and I can remember being overcome with
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the emotion you know I'm not here to hurt the guy in fact I wasn't even really conscious of the crime that he
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committed you got a human being we're down here tying a person to a gurney about to take his life you're not
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thinking about the crime that he committed and the least you want to do is go on a record consciously and being
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aware that you're hurting him in the process this whole process supposed to be pain listen
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so I asked one of the correctional officers on the tie-down team to make an adjustment
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to the strap of the wrist that he said was hurting him the adjustment was made and he looked up at me and said thank
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you boss and we did what we will call upon to do by the citizens of the state of Oregon
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it's difficult to think in terms of being commended for having done your job well
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and you've taken the life of somebody and so when I walked away from telling the
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media the time of death I remember walking from that room up to my office not knowing
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what I was going to do after leaving the office because out of all of that practicing
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I had in practice what I was going to do after leaving the prison and I felt a an uncomfortable
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void it wasn't even a relief it was a void that that pressure was off of me but that was just this huge emptiness of
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is like not really realizing the impact of what I had been through and what my staff had
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been through and that carried on for all all of that night and I got in my car the next day
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and took off on a long trip Frank Thompson says that some members of his staff left the job afterwards
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some said they would never participate again and then nine months later he got word
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that another inmate was to be executed and now I'm facing a second one yep that was that came as a surprise
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it came as a surprise the fear of something going wrong Ed quite frankly larger the second time
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than it did the first time in fact I think the second time I was more aware of what could go wrong
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than I was the first time through and I was quite concerned about all of my staff quite frankly so the second one
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was not any easier and uh with that answer I want you to appreciate the fact that
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take it from me killing somebody it never gets easier Harry Charles Moore had been convicted
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of killing his half-sister and her ex-husband he threatened to sue anyone who tried to
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stop his execution and petitioned the Oregon Supreme Court to forego the automatic appeal of his sentence
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he died by lethal injection in May of 1997. to date there have been no execution
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since Frank Thompson oversaw organs only two implementations of the death penalty in
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56 years he retired from Corrections in 2010 and has dedicated himself to repealing the
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death penalty in Oregon and around the country I've become acutely frustrated where it
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appears as ifs that by being against the death penalty ignores the plight of those who lost
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loved ones and that I am championing the interest of the person that's been executed
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more so than I am the mother whose kid three-year-old kid was shot by a drive-by that somehow or another I'm not
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sensitive to those needs I'm very very very sensitive to the victims so much so that
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I want to challenge our society to understand that by supporting the death penalty we
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create another set of victims by asking decent men and women who know nothing about killing anybody
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they are poetry they are less trained than the average Soldier their job every day is to keep peace run
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smooth institutions feed inmates they even get to like and know inmates and then they are turned around and asked to
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execute them nobody really thinks about taking the lives of a human being until it's taken the life of a human being
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becomes a newsworthy but the administration of justice is something that everybody has to take
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seriously all the time in the back of my mind I think on some level if we can ask
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jurors to send us a person to death they'll role in sentencing a person to death
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is just as significant as the Executioner depressing the plunger and administering lethal fluids into the
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veins the jurors actually I wish there might be if we're going to keep capital punishment what would be
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wrong creating a lottery of citizens in the city out of which they would be selected just
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like they're selected to sit on a jury and they be trained to be the Executioner and spread some of
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this toil around if we are going to be killing people those kinds of thoughts I don't think
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enough people are running through their minds support for the death penalty has been
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declining steadily over the past four decades although a Pew research survey found a recent uptick in support
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[Music] criminal is produced by Lauren Spore Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob
00:25:05
Byers matild erfelino is our intern Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of
00:25:12
Criminal you can see them at thisiscriminal.com where on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show Criminal is
00:25:20
recorded in the studios of North Carolina public radio wunc we're a proud member of radiotopia from PRX a a
00:25:29
collection of the best podcasts around and there's a brand new radiotopia show that we're really excited about it's
00:25:36
called Everything Is Alive hosted by our friend Ian Kellogg it's an interview show but all the subjects are inanimate
00:25:45
objects it's somewhere between fiction and non-fiction the objects often share real
00:25:51
stories from their world funny and moving and you learn a lot too go to everything is alive.com to hear
00:25:59
the first episode featuring Lewis a can of generic Cola my name is Louis and I am a can of gotu cola that's a store
00:26:07
brand go to go to so it's similar to Coca-Cola similar people call it a knockoff I've been called The Best of
00:26:16
the worst you know if you wanted to get my honest opinion I believe in a blind taste test your average person wouldn't
00:26:23
be able to tell the difference between me and a can of regular Coca-Cola but yeah uh bottom shelf
00:26:29
we can describe it comfortably as bottom shelf on that piece with that literally
00:26:33
on the most of the time yeah go listen special thanks to adzerk to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
00:26:49
[Music]