The Job

Speaker 1 Support for criminal comes from BetterHelp. Many American adults get the blues this time of year, sometimes as a result of seasonal affective disorder.

Speaker 1 But BetterHelp wants to encourage you to reach out, get coffee with an old friend, write a letter to a family member, and take that first step to connect with a licensed therapist using BetterHelp.

Speaker 1 This month, don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step.

Speaker 1 You can get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com slash criminal. That's betterhelp.com slash criminal.

Speaker 1 With a Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. And you get big purchasing power.
So your business can spend more and earn more.

Speaker 1 Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at capital1.com slash spark cash plus. Terms apply.

Speaker 2 My name is

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 My parents were together. We were involved in the church.
So we had our social outlets through our church. We were brought up in a very cohesive black community.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 quite frankly, I think I really became alive on a

Speaker 2 social issue setting when Emmett Till was killed.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 threw his body into a river.

Speaker 3 A month later, both men were acquitted by an all-white jury. Frank Thompson remembers it well.
He was 13 years old, just a year younger than Emmett Till.

Speaker 2 Oh, boy, you know,

Speaker 2 every mother, every father

Speaker 2 related to having lost a child, that's one level.

Speaker 2 Even though there had been lynchings all across the South, Emmett Till's death just sort of punctuated the sensitivities to where

Speaker 2 even though Christians are against

Speaker 2 killing,

Speaker 2 I came up in a a church where many of the black Christians felt that capital punishment was

Speaker 2 an appropriate social sanction against those who would

Speaker 2 kill as they killed Emmett Till.

Speaker 2 Because every black felt it. I mean, there was no youngster that would walk to the street that felt like at any moment you might be strung up for a reason.
Let me give you an example.

Speaker 2 I can remember that within three weeks

Speaker 2 of Emmett's death,

Speaker 2 I got on a bus which was segregated where I was required to sit in the back of the bus.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 because I did not want to inadvertently look in the eyes of some white woman and be accused of flirting.

Speaker 2 I'll never forget that feeling.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's how Emmett Teal's murder began to affect my psyche about racism in the South.

Speaker 2 So that was the beginning, quite frankly, of my accepting

Speaker 2 capital punishment as being something that should be administered against those who were so guilty of acts as was perpetrated against Ebbett Till.

Speaker 3 Years 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.

Speaker 3 This is Criminal.

Speaker 3 Frank 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.

Speaker 3 He returned to Arkansas, finished college, and got a job with the Arkansas Department of Corrections.

Speaker 2 Arkansas has been a capital punishment state for quite some time,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 a number of executions took place. I was never a part

Speaker 2 of an execution directly, personally.

Speaker 2 But whenever executions took place in Arkansas, all institutions would be put on alert and we would go go into an operation mode of reduced activities, higher control activities,

Speaker 2 monitoring inmate behaviors, monitoring inmate associations, trying to get a feel for the pulse of the institutions regardless of where we were located.

Speaker 2 And you never know how the execution of one inmate might affect the quiet, the

Speaker 2 atmosphere in any institution. Meals are very, very important to the inmate population.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Those kinds of things that you and I take for

Speaker 2 granted in the free world are exponentially more important to the inmate population while locked up behind the bars and the walls.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 They 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.

Speaker 2 And they said

Speaker 2 there's a chance you might have to execute somebody before it's all over here.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they asked me, did I think I could carry out my duties? And without hesitation, I told them that I'm a good soldier.

Speaker 2 I can do my job. And the reason I was able to say that,

Speaker 2 in the military, I was trained to take life if I had to.

Speaker 2 At the same time, I was asked that question.

Speaker 2 Oregon had not had an execution in over 32 years.

Speaker 2 We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Support for criminal comes from BetterHelp. The holidays can be a wonderful, but often hectic and sometimes lonely time of year.

Speaker 1 Therapy can help you make sure you're taking care of yourself, no matter what.

Speaker 1 BetterHelp does the initial matching work to find the right therapist for you so you can focus on your goals in the short and long term. This December, start a new tradition by taking care of you.

Speaker 1 Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash criminal. That's betterhelp.com/slash criminal.

Speaker 1 With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you can earn a limited 2% cash back on every purchase. And you get big purchasing power.
So your business can spend more and earn more.

Speaker 1 Stephen Brandon and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud, reinvested their 2% cash back to help build their retail presence. Now, that's serious business.

Speaker 1 What could the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One do for your business?

Speaker 2 Capital One, what's in your wallet?

Speaker 1 Find out more at capital1.com/slash slash spark cash plus. Terms apply.

Speaker 3 How soon after you started the job did you find out that you would need to execute someone?

Speaker 2 I think it was about 18 months.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 And it had been 30 years.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 you tell me about it. That's exactly how I felt.
I'm saying, I'm just getting here.

Speaker 3 The last execution in the state had been in 1962, when Oregon was still using a gas chamber.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 So that meant that I had to go in and rewrite the protocols for a lethal injection

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 to be confidentially identified and perform the execution.

Speaker 2 If 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 How do you even go about writing protocols for something

Speaker 3 you've never seen before? Where do you go? Where do you turn?

Speaker 2 You go and watch somebody get executed. A key number of us flew to San Quentin.
We witnessed an execution.

Speaker 2 I flew

Speaker 2 a colleague of mine from Arkansas

Speaker 2 to teach me

Speaker 2 how to administer the lethal fluids so that I could

Speaker 2 train the executioner here in Oregon how to administer the same process.

Speaker 2 You go to Texas and tell Texas to send me your protocols.

Speaker 2 And we didn't want to deviate because Texas was conducting executions quicker and faster than any other state in the country.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So quite frankly, we pulled from the experiences of primarily Texas and Arkansas to build the protocols for Oregon.

Speaker 3 Do you remember having conversations with people when you were trying to recruit those to help you with the execution? People saying,

Speaker 3 I just can't. I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 I don't think I can handle that.

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 was probably one of the

Speaker 2 more challenging tasks I had to perform

Speaker 2 is trying to

Speaker 2 know who to choose

Speaker 2 to put on the team

Speaker 2 that was going to have to

Speaker 2 take the life of a human being for the first time in any of their lives.

Speaker 2 Because I had been in the military and I had been trained to take life,

Speaker 2 and I decided to recruit those who had military experience.

Speaker 2 So I told my assistant superintendent to comb

Speaker 2 the staffing pattern,

Speaker 2 to come up with the names of as many veterans we had on staff.

Speaker 2 By definition of the fact that they were veterans, I know they had fired a weapon.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That they had dealt with this whole notion on some level of killing somebody.

Speaker 2 So the well-being of my staff, and some people think this is

Speaker 2 doesn't make sense, but the well-being of my staff actually loomed larger in getting this execution process together, larger than my immediate concern about the person who was to be executed.

Speaker 2 His destiny was set by law.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 the rest would follow course course

Speaker 2 as planned.

Speaker 3 Once you had your team assembled, did you practice or rehearse exactly what you were doing?

Speaker 2 Of course, of course. In fact,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 from the emotions that could become involved. In fact, there was one time I asked them to strap me on the gurney as they

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And during one exercise, I asked them

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 use me

Speaker 2 as the

Speaker 2 surrogate inmate to put their minds at ease that I was

Speaker 2 with them.

Speaker 2 And I will say to you this,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the hour, date, and time, I don't know, but I can remember saying to my

Speaker 2 assistant superintendent, man,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 this is not what

Speaker 2 the state ought to be doing.

Speaker 2 And so I began sharing with key people,

Speaker 2 and it was through that meticulous detail

Speaker 2 I was

Speaker 2 sitting in a room with a guy that had been chosen to be

Speaker 2 the executioner, the one to depress the plunger into the syringe,

Speaker 2 sending the lethal fluid into the vein of the guy on the gurney.

Speaker 2 And I'm sitting in this room with a bucket.

Speaker 2 We were both sitting on stools

Speaker 2 with a bucket

Speaker 2 sitting between us.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 but at a rate almost equal to that being drawn by the force of gravity. So, where it just sort of flows out and is not propelled.
As I was saying those kinds of things to him,

Speaker 2 I remember that inner feeling that

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 doesn't

Speaker 2 feel right.

Speaker 2 We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Support for criminal comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to do holiday shopping your way, whether you're looking for the right gift or the right outfit.

Speaker 1 Saks is where you can find everything from a Jimmy Choo bag for a sister who's hard to shop for to a Prada jacket for yourself to dress up for holiday dinner.

Speaker 1 If you don't know where to start, Sachs.com will filter just for items that match your personal style so you can save time shopping and spend more time just enjoying the holidays.

Speaker 1 Make shopping fun and easy this season and find gifts that suit your holiday style at Sax Fifth Avenue.

Speaker 4 Amazon Black Friday week deals are here with everything for everyone on your list, like your Uncle Ricky, who ruined every single one of your wedding photos because his fly was open.

Speaker 4 Get him a three-pack of new underpants.

Speaker 4 And right now with Amazon Black Friday week deals, you can save up to 40% on the gifts everyone wants, like the latest toys and housewares, and the gifts they need, like underpants.

Speaker 2 And Ricky, wear them, please.

Speaker 3 Leading up to Oregon's first execution in more than 30 years, Superintendent Frank Thompson and his staff simulated the process from start to finish, bringing in witnesses and seating them in the gallery, simulating the phone call from the governor's office to let them know that there was no stay of execution.

Speaker 3 They practiced interacting with the press and informing them of time of death and how long it took for the inmate to die.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He says no one backed out.

Speaker 3 And in September of 1996, Douglas Franklin Wright was the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the state of Oregon.

Speaker 3 Wright had confessed to murdering four homeless men after promising them jobs. He didn't appeal his death sentence.

Speaker 2 He indicated to us

Speaker 2 that the straps to his wrist

Speaker 2 were hurting him.

Speaker 2 And 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the least you want to do is go on the record consciously and being aware that you're hurting him in the process. This whole process is supposed to be painless and

Speaker 2 so I

Speaker 2 asked one of the correctional officers on the tie-down team to make an adjustment

Speaker 2 to the strap of the wrist that he said

Speaker 2 was hurting him.

Speaker 2 The adjustment was made.

Speaker 2 And he looked up at me and said, thank you, boss.

Speaker 2 And we did

Speaker 2 what we were called upon to do

Speaker 2 by the citizens of the state of Oregon.

Speaker 2 It's difficult to think in terms of being commended

Speaker 2 for having

Speaker 2 done your job well.

Speaker 2 And you've taken the life of somebody.

Speaker 2 And so when I walked away from

Speaker 2 telling the

Speaker 2 media

Speaker 2 the time of death,

Speaker 2 I remember walking from that room up to my office, not knowing

Speaker 2 what I was going to do after leaving the office because

Speaker 2 out of all of that practicing,

Speaker 2 I hadn't practiced what I was going to do after leaving the prison.

Speaker 2 And I felt

Speaker 2 an uncomfortable

Speaker 2 void. It wasn't even a relief.
It was a void that that pressure was off of me.

Speaker 2 But that was just this huge emptiness of

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 not really realizing the impact of what I had been through and what my staff had been through.

Speaker 2 And that carried on for,

Speaker 2 oh,

Speaker 2 all of that night.

Speaker 2 And I got in my car the next day

Speaker 2 and took off on a

Speaker 2 long trip.

Speaker 3 Frank Thompson says that some members of his staff left the job afterwards. Some said they would never participate again.

Speaker 3 And then, nine months later, he got word that another inmate was to be executed.

Speaker 2 And now I'm facing a second one.

Speaker 2 That was, that came as a surprise. It came as a surprise.

Speaker 2 The fear of something going wrong loomed, quite frankly, larger the second time

Speaker 2 than it did the first time.

Speaker 2 In fact, I think the second time I was more aware of what could go wrong than I was the first time through.

Speaker 2 And I was quite concerned about all of my staff, quite frankly. So the second one was not any easier.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 with that answer, I want you to appreciate the fact that,

Speaker 2 take it from me,

Speaker 2 killing somebody never gets easier.

Speaker 3 Harry Charles Moore had been convicted of killing his half-sister and her ex-husband.

Speaker 3 He'd threatened to sue anyone who tried to stop his execution and petitioned the Oregon Supreme Court to forego the automatic appeal of his sentence. He died by lethal injection in May of 1997.

Speaker 3 To date, there have been no executions since. Frank Thompson oversaw Oregon's only two implementations of the death penalty in 56 years.

Speaker 3 He retired from corrections in 2010 and has dedicated himself to repealing the death penalty in Oregon and around the country.

Speaker 2 I'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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm very, very, very sensitive to the victims, so much so that

Speaker 2 I want to challenge our society to understand

Speaker 2 that by supporting the death penalty, we create another set of victims

Speaker 2 by asking decent men and women who know nothing about killing anybody. They are poorly trained.
They are less trained than the average soldier.

Speaker 2 Their job every day is to keep peace, run smooth institutions, feed inmates. They even get to like and know inmates.

Speaker 2 And then they are turned around and asked to execute them.

Speaker 2 Nobody really thinks about

Speaker 2 taking the life of a human being until taking the life of a human being becomes newsworthy.

Speaker 2 But the administration of justice is something that everybody has to take seriously all the time.

Speaker 2 In the back of my mind, I think on some level, if we can ask

Speaker 2 jurors

Speaker 2 to sentence a person to death,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The jurors,

Speaker 2 actually,

Speaker 2 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 a jury and they be trained to be the executioner and spread some of this toil around if we are going to be killing people.

Speaker 2 Those kinds of thoughts, I don't think

Speaker 2 enough people are running through their minds.

Speaker 3 Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Speaker 3 Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Sagiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinnane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.
This episode was mixed by Rob Byers.

Speaker 3 Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

Speaker 3 And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

Speaker 3 We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads of Mystery without any ads.

Speaker 3 Plus, you'll get bonus episodes.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com/slash plus.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

Speaker 1 I'm Phoebe Judge.

Speaker 3 This is Criminal.

Speaker 1 Time. It's always vanishing.
The commute, the errands, the work functions, the meetings, selling your car.

Speaker 1 Unless you sell your car with carvana get a real offer in minutes get it picked up from your door get paid on the spot so fast you'll wonder what it catches there isn't one we just respect you and your time oh you're still here move along now enjoy your day sell your car today carvana pickup fees may apply

Speaker 5 support for this show comes from capital one With the VentureX business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase.

Speaker 5 Plus, the VentureX business card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet your business needs.

Speaker 2 Capital 1.

Speaker 5 What's in your wallet?