The Job

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0:36Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. My name is Frank Thompson, born in Arkansas, educated in Arkansas. When I grew up, it was, of course, the segregated South. But I was quite fortunate. I was raised in a very loving family. My parents were together. We were involved in the church.

1:25So we had our social outlets through our church. We were brought up in a very cohesive black community. And quite frankly, I think I really became alive on a social issue setting when Emmett Till was killed. In 1955, Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi when a white woman accused him of whistling at her in her family's grocery store and making sexual advances. A few nights later, the woman's husband and his half-brother kidnapped, tortured, and shot 14-year-old Emmett Till. They tied a 75-pound industrial fan around his neck and through his body into a river. A month later, both men were acquitted by an all-white jury.

2:19Frank Thompson remembers it well. He was 13 years old, just a year younger than Emmett Till. Oh, boy. You know, every mother, every father related to having lost a child. That's one level. Even though there had been lynchings all across the South, Emmett Till's death just sort of punctuated the sensitivities to where, even though Christians are against killing, I came up in a church where many of the black Christians felt that capital punishment was an appropriate social sanction against those who would kill as they killed Emmett Till. Because every black felt it. I mean, there was no youngster that would walk the street that felt like at any moment you might be strung up for a reason.

3:20Let me give you an example. I can remember that within three weeks of Emmett's death, I got on a bus, 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 talking to you that feeling I had when I got on the bus, I was walking down this aisle looking at the ceiling of the bus or looking at the floor of the bus because I did not want to inadvertently look in the eyes of some white woman and be accused of flirting. I'll never forget that feeling. I didn't have the freedom of looking where I felt I didn't have the freedom of looking where I felt like I wanted to look on a public bus because somebody might say I winked at a white woman.

4:20That's how Emmett Till's murder began to affect my psyche about racism in the South. So that was the beginning, quite frankly, of my accepting capital punishment as being something that should be administered against those who were so guilty of acts as was perpetrated against Ebbett Till.

4:53Years later, it would become Frank Thompson's job to learn how to perform an execution, step by step, and how to identify which of his colleagues were best suited to help him do it. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

5:20Frank Thompson went to college to study medicine, but left school to serve in the Army during the Vietnam War. He was a military police officer. He returned to Arkansas, finished college, and got a job with the Arkansas Department of Corrections. Arkansas has been a capital punishment state for quite some time, and a number of executions took place. I was never a part of an execution directly, personally, but whenever executions took place in Arkansas, all institutions would be put on alert. and we would go into an operation mode of reduced activities, higher control activities, monitoring inmate behaviors, monitoring inmate associations, trying to get a feel for the pulse of the institutions regardless of where we were located.

6:20And you never know how the execution of one inmate might affect the quiet, the atmosphere in any institution. Meals are very, very important to the inmate population. Inmates will go off even if there is not an execution taking 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 kinds of subtleties. Those kinds of things that you and I take for granted in the free world are exponentially more important to the inmate population while locked up behind the bars and the walls. He was promoted to warden and stayed in Arkansas for five years before interviewing for a job in 1994 as the superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary.

7:19They did tell me, Frank, you do know that you are applying for a job in Oregon where there's capital punishment. And I told them I did. And they said, there's a chance you might have to execute somebody before it's all over here. and they asked me, did I think I could carry out my duties? And without hesitation, I told them that I'm a good soldier, I can do my job. And the reason I was able to say that, in the military, I was trained to take life if I had to. At the same time, I was asked that question. Oregon had not had an execution in over 32 years.

8:09We'll be right back.

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9:01On them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. How soon after you started the job did you find out that you would need to execute someone? I think it was about 18 months. I could deliver this death warrant from the governor's office and all of a sudden I am responsible for taking the life of a human being in the name of the public.

9:42And it had been 30 years. Yeah, you tell me about it. That's exactly how I felt. I'm saying, I'm just getting here. The last execution in the state had been in 1962 when Oregon was still using a gas chamber. Since then, the laws had changed, requiring executions to be performed by lethal injection. But no one in the state had ever done one before. So that meant that I had to go in and rewrite the protocols for a lethal injection execution. I had to train the staff, including myself. There was no one who had been an executioner. I had to go out and identify someone who was willing to be confidentially identified and perform the execution.

10:37If I had come to Oregon and they had done two or three executions within the past two or three years, I would have called my team together and said, okay, folk, let's get in here and let's get this thing done. 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 people there to help me pull this off. And if that had been the case, I imagine I could have gone through two, three, four, five executions without it bothering me nearly as soon or nearly as profoundly as it did in having to conduct the first execution for the first time. How do you even go about writing protocols for something you've never seen before?

11:32Where do you go? Where do you turn? You go and watch somebody get executed. A key number of us flew to San Quentin and we witnessed an execution. I flew a colleague of mine from Arkansas to teach me how to administer the lethal fluids so that I could train the executioner here in Oregon how to administer the same process. You go to Texas and tell Texas to send me your protocols. And we didn't want to deviate because Texas was conducting executions quicker and faster than any other state in the country. And if we were ever questioned about how did you come up with your protocol, Frank, one of the first things I'd be able to tell them, Well, we went to a state that had a history of conducting executions, and we used their protocols.

12:41So quite frankly, we pulled from the experiences of primarily Texas and Arkansas to build the protocols for Oregon. Do you remember having conversations with people when you were trying to recruit those to help you with the execution? People saying, I just can't. I'm sorry. I don't think I can handle that. That was probably one of the more challenging tasks I had to perform, is trying to know who to choose to put on the team that was going to have to take the life of a human being for the first time in the end of their lives. Because I had been in the military and I had been trained to take life and I decided to recruit those who had military experience.

13:55So I told my assistant superintendent to comb the staffing pattern, to come up with the names of as many veterans we had on staff. By definition of the fact that they were veterans, I know they had fired a weapon. By definition, I know that they have gone through the emotional and psychological process of contemplating and thinking about what learning how to fire a weapon meant. They had dealt with this whole notion on some level of killing somebody. So the well-being of my staff, and some people think this doesn't make sense, but the well-being of my staff actually loomed larger in getting this execution process together.

14:47larger than my immediate concern about the person who was to be executed. His destiny was set by law. He was going to be executed. It was my job to be sure that he was executed as humanely and as painlessly as possible. And I knew that if I could get my staff through this, the rest would follow course as planned. Once you had your team assembled, did you practice or rehearse exactly what was... Of course. Of course. In fact, we rehearsed over and over and over. And I got that from the military. I wanted my staff to be able to perform their tasks detached from the emotions that could become involved.

15:43In fact, there was one time I asked them to strap me on the gurney as a, see, they normally would strap one another. They would take roles and they would assume the position of the inmate on the gurney and they would tie themselves down or each other down. And during one exercise, I asked them to use me as the surrogate inmate to put their minds at ease that I was with them. 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 back as any time I can remember in my life. and the hour, date, and time, I don't know, but I can remember saying to my assistant superintendent, man, you know, this is not what the state ought to be doing.

16:51And so I began sharing with key people, and it was through that meticulous detail. I was sitting in a room with the guy that had been chosen to be the executioner, the one to depress the plunger into the syringe, sending the lethal fluid into the vein of the guy on the gurney. And I'm sitting in this room with a bucket. We were both sitting on stools. with a bucket sitting between us. And I'm drawing the water into the syringe, and I'm instructing him to depress the plunger at a rate that it is not propelled out of the needle, but at a rate almost equal to that being drawn by the force of gravity.

17:54so where it just sort of flows out and is not propelled. As I was saying those kinds of things to him, I remember that inner feeling that this just doesn't feel right.

18:21We'll be right back.

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20:10They practiced interacting with the press and informing them of time of death and how long it took for the inmate to die. But Frank says he was also talking with members of his staff about his reservations and making sure that they knew that they didn't have to be involved if they didn't want to. He says no one backed out. And in September of 1996, Douglas Franklin Wright was the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the state of Oregon. Wright had confessed to murdering four homeless men after promising them jobs. He didn't appeal his death sentence. He indicated to us that the straps to his wrist were hurting him.

21:02And I can remember being overcome with 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 committed. You've got a human being, we're down here tying a person to a gurney about to take his life. You're not thinking about the crime that he committed. and the least you want to do is go on record consciously and being aware that you're hurting him in the process. This whole process is supposed to be painless. So I asked one of the correctional officers on the tie-down team to make an adjustment to the strap of the wrist that he said was hurting him.

21:49The adjustment was made, and he looked up at me and said, Thank you, boss. And we did what we were called upon to do by the citizens of the state of Oregon. It's difficult to think in terms of being commended for having done your job well, and you've taken the life of somebody. And so when I walked away from telling the media the time of death, I remember walking from that room up to my office not knowing what I was going to do after leaving the office because out of all of that practicing, I hadn't practiced what I was going to do after leaving the prison. And I felt an uncomfortable void. It wasn't even a relief.

23:05It was a void that that pressure was off of me. But there was just this huge emptiness of, like, not really realizing the impact of what I had been through and what my staff had been through. And that carried on for, oh, all of that night. And I got in my car the next day and took off on a long trip. Frank Thompson says that some members of his staff left the job afterwards. Some said they would never participate again. And then, nine months later, he got word that another inmate was to be executed. And now I'm facing a second one. That came as a surprise. It came as a surprise. The fear of something going wrong loomed, quite frankly, larger the second time than it did the first time.

24:21In fact, I think the second time I was more aware of what could go wrong than I was the first time through. And I was quite concerned about all of my staff, quite frankly. So the second one was not any easier.

24:41And with that answer, I want you to appreciate the fact that, take it from me, killing somebody never gets easier. Harry Charles Moore had been convicted of killing his half-sister and her ex-husband. He'd threatened to sue anyone who tried to stop his execution and petition the Oregon Supreme Court to forego the automatic appeal of his sentence. He died by lethal injection in May of 1997. To date, there have been no executions since. Frank Thompson oversaw Oregon's only two implementations of the death penalty in 56 years. He retired from corrections in 2010 and has dedicated himself to repealing the death penalty in Oregon and around the country.

25:37I've become acutely frustrated where it appears as if that my being against the death penalty ignores the plight of those who've lost loved ones and that I am championing the interest of the person that's been executed more so than I am the mother whose kid, three-year-old kid, was shot by a drive-by, and that somehow or another I'm not sensitive to those needs. I'm very, very, very sensitive to the victims, so much so that I want to challenge our society to understand that by supporting the death penalty, we create another set of victims by asking decent men and women who know nothing about killing anybody.

26:35They are poorly trained. They are less trained than the average soldier. Their job every day is to keep peace, run smooth institutions, feed inmates. They even get to like and know inmates. And then they are turned around and asked to execute them. Nobody really thinks about taking the life of a human being until taking the life of a human being becomes newsworthy. But the administration of justice is something that everybody has to take seriously all the time. In the back of my mind, I think on some level, if we can ask jurors to sentence a person to death, their role in sentencing a person to death is just as significant as the executioner depressing the plunger and administering lethal fluids into the veins.

27:38The jurors, actually, I wish there might be, if we're going to keep capital punishment, what would be wrong in creating a lottery of citizens in the city, out of which they would be selected, just like they're selected to sit on the jury, and they be trained to be the executioner, and spread some of this toil around if we are going to be killing people. Those kinds of thoughts, I don't think enough people are running through their minds.

28:45We'll see you next time.

29:04without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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