‘Hush’ Episode 9: State of Denial

Jesse Johnson is free, but what has changed in Oregon?

Experts who have closely examined the state’s racist history say very little. A close look at a 1902 lynching in Southern Oregon, a murder on a train in the 1940s, and the state’s last executions in the late ‘90s reveals a straight line to Johnson’s plight and the ways systemic racism continues to shape Oregon. Johnson’s story offers a chance for the state to change history rather than cover up and repeat discrimination still playing out today.

The architect of Oregon’s most recent executions – a Black man from Arkansas and former prison warden – says it’s time for the state to chart a new path. “I’m the messenger, and Jesse is the message,” Frank Thompson said.

Listen to all episodes of the “Hush” podcast here.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Leah Sottile: Before we get started, a warning: This episode contains discussions of racial violence, including a lynching. Please keep that in mind in choosing when and where to listen.

Of the 25 years that Jesse Johnson spent behind bars in Oregon, 17 were on death row.

Life there had its own rhythm: walk outside, work out, shower, eat, watch TV. He was one of 29 people on the row, living in this big, mostly-empty wing of the Oregon State Penitentiary.

Jesse Johnson: I was on the death row with actual killers, you know? And they looked at everybody about the same, somewhat. Me? I got along with everybody.

Sottile: For a while, he had a job picking up trays in the cafeteria. Most of the time, he would sit in his cell reading his case files over and over. Johnson told anyone on the row who would listen that he was innocent, and in a way that became part of everyone’s routine, too. Johnson saying, I’m here, but I shouldn’t really be here.

Johnson: I was telling them all, “Oh, nope, I’m here. My body is, but my mind is not. I’m going free.”

Sottile: He said it felt like he’d fallen into an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Johnson: A lot of people thought I was crazy. A lot of people, a lot of people, especially a few death row officers said, “Why are you always smiling?” I said, “Well, trying to keep from crying.”

Sottile: One day, he was watching his favorite show on TV, 20/20.

Johnson: 20/20 was doing a thing on The Innocence Project for New York. I think it was New York or Connecticut, somewhere, and they had the national hotline number up there and I got it and the address.

Sottile: He scribbled down the address for The Innocence Project, and mailed them a letter in Washington, D.C. Thought this might finally be his chance to get someone to listen.

Aliza Kaplan: Jesse is very mild mannered.

Sottile: This is Aliza Kaplan. She worked as deputy director of the national Innocence Project and co-founded the Oregon chapter. Eventually, Johnson’s plea for help reached her.

Kaplan: As a former innocence lawyer, I think the thing that he had that many former clients of mine have had that are innocent is just a determination to prove their innocence and not to agree to anything that wasn’t true. To just stand their ground, so that’s how he was the first time we met. But I think he also seemed exhausted.

Sottile: By the time the Innocence Project took a hard look at Johnson’s case around 2014, Oregon had been saying he was a killer for more than a decade.

Kaplan: These are very unpopular cases because people don’t want to look backwards and admit that there was a mistake made, or that we’ve learned something new today.

Sottile: Cases like Johnson’s require reflection. And reflecting on the past presents Oregonians with a special kind of problem that conflicts with the progressive story people try to tell.

Kaplan gave an example. She said, look at how Oregon voters’ throughout history have had an on-again/off-again relationship with capital punishment. Way back in 1914, Oregonians abolished the death penalty. In 1920, people voted it back in. In ‘64, Oregonians once again abolished the death penalty. Then in ‘78, voters brought it back.

Kaplan: You can see the fluctuations, just like ‒ we had it, we didn’t have it. So, you know, it reflects this idea that we want to have this incredibly serious punishment, but we’re uncomfortable with it.

Sottile: Oregon has this reputation nationwide as a progressive utopia. Portland ‒ the state’s largest city ‒ is often seen as on par with San Francisco and New York for its liberal politics, and it’s often portrayed as a boogeyman by conservative media.

But Kaplan, who is now a law professor at Lewis & Clark law school, said take one one look at the justice system and that progressive image starts to look pretty flimsy.

Kaplan: We incarcerated people of color at the same rate per capita as many southern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, etc. We had non unanimous juries like Louisiana. I think it’s really what makes Oregon interesting in some ways, that we’re viewed from the outside world as this liberal place. But are we? I mean, no, we’re not. And I’m not making a judgment on that, but we’re really not as obvious as people think. And I think the death penalty is a great example of that.

Sottile: Back when we started reporting, we set out to tell you the story of Jesse Lee Johnson ‒ the evidence against him, and the evidence pointing to his innocence.

But the further we got, the more it became clear that what happened to Johnson in 1998 ties directly back to Oregon’s foundational story.

Just like how there are these two stories of Jesse Johnson ‒ the one the state tried to tell, where he’s a killer, and the one that he tells, where he’s innocent ‒ there are two stories to Oregon, too: The story of the progressive utopia, and then the story of a place that refuses to change the old plot, where Johnson is the next in a long line of Black people who are villainized.

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, this is Hush. I’m Leah Sottile. This is Episode 9: State of Denial.

When Oregon was founded on Valentine’s Day, 1859 ‒ two years before the Civil War ‒ lawmakers proudly professed that this new state would stand with the union in opposition to slavery.

And yet, at the very same time, Oregon lawmakers banned any Black, mixed race or Indigenous person from living in the state, or even entering it. That bigotry was enshrined in the state constitution.

All of this made Oregon racist in a way that no other state could really claim, and that exclusion clause remained in the state’s founding document until the 1920s.

During the first 50 years of statehood, Oregon executed people in public hangings outside county courthouses. At the last public hanging in Marion County, where Salem is located, 500 people watched as a Black man named Joe Drake was led to the gallows. Drake had been convicted of murdering a white farmer, but he is now widely believed to have been innocent.

Drake said to the crowd who’d gathered to watch him die ‒ quote ‒ ”I am going to be executed for a crime I know nothing about. I am about to die for a deed committed by other hands.”

It was hardly the last killing of its kind in the state.

Taylor Stewart: So, the year was 1902.

Sottile: This is Taylor Stewart.

Stewart: Alonzo Tucker lived in a community known as Marshfield, present-day Coos Bay, Oregon. He was a boxer from California.

Sottile: Stewart runs a nonprofit called the Oregon Remembrance Project, and he’s given a lot of speeches in the past few years about a Black man named Alonzo Tucker.

Stewart: He was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman, the wife of a miner from Libby, a nearby community. And upon that news, he was arrested and a mob formed with the intention of lynching him.

Sottile: The way Stewart told us the story, Tucker outran the mob and spent a night hiding underneath some docks.

Stewart: Tucker was found the next morning by two young boys, meaning that this effort to lynch Alonzo Tucker had become so community widespread that even children were involved in the hunt.

Sottile: Afterward, the mob shot and killed him.

Stewart: So the mob strung up Alonzo Tucker’s dead body from a light pole on the old Marshfield Bridge in front of a crowd of 300.

Sottile: This story isn’t one Stewart learned in school growing up in Oregon. It was information kept away from the public, or maybe just deemed irrelevant. Stewart only learned about Tucker’s fate in 2018, when he took a college trip to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Stewart: I’ll never forget going to that museum, because I couldn’t believe that I had lived in Oregon my entire life and I had to go all the way to Montgomery, Alabama, just to learn that there had been at least one widely documented lynching of an African-American here in Oregon.

Sottile: Back at home, he started researching Tucker’s story, made plans to get a memorial built. But as he did that work, he started to see that Oregon’s laws still carried the legacy of its racist founding. And the latest federal data shows how the death penalty is a part of a racist system. Forty-one percent of all people on death row in America are Black.

Stewart: Lynching simply just evolved into the death penalty. The fundamental question of who our society believes deserves death for a wrong committed simply transitioned from lynching to the death penalty.

Sottile: In the mid-1940s, the state put a 21-year-old Black man from Arkansas to death ‒ a cook on a railroad line named Robert Folkes. I came across his story when I was researching the history of the death penalty here, and there were a startling number of similarities to Jesse Johnson’s trial and conviction.

I got on the phone with Max Geier to talk about the Folkes case. He’s a professor emeritus in the history department at Western Oregon University. He wrote a fascinating book about the case called “The Color of Night.”

Geier said the story started with this young woman on a train passing through Oregon.

Max Geier: In the early morning hours, there was an alarm that was raised. One of the Pullman porters who was in the men’s restroom at the time came running out, turned on the lights, and what people saw was the young woman, about 20 years old, laying in a crumpled heap on the floor of the Pullman car.

Sottile: Standing over this woman bleeding out on the floor was a white marine named Harold Wilson.

Geier: Nobody actually saw the murder. Even Wilson claimed that all he saw was a dark figure running towards the rear of the train.

Sottile: Wilson told the police he saw a dark figure flee from the scene of the crime. And so the investigators focused on the Black train workers.

Geier said they honed in on Robert Folkes as their prime suspect because he was the only person awake at the time, cooking breakfast in the dining car.

Geier: Folkes is isolated on the train and interrogated. He’s stripped naked, put in a men’s lavatory with three very large Pacific Railroad officers who harangue him in there nonstop for about eight hours.

Sottile: Folkes was eventually jailed and put on trial for the murder.

At that trial, the prosecutors passed off fingerprints as good forensic science. They also presented transcripts of two police interrogations of Folkes, which they insisted contained confessions. Folkes refused to sign those transcripts, saying police coerced him and fabricated the statements. He then again insisted he never committed a murder.

Geier: And that’s really the only evidence against him. They never found any physical evidence linking him to the murder. There was no eyewitness. Even Wilson didn’t claim this was the guy who did the murder.

Sottile: In the end, Folkes was convicted by an all-white jury in Oregon, and sentenced to die.

As Geier researched his book, he started to find problems with the trial records. Whole pieces were missing.

Geier: There had been places where the transcript had literally been cut and pasted, and in a way that actually highlighted incriminatory information. And of course, the same thing happened with the so-called confessions.

Sottile: The more he researched, the more convinced he became that Folkes was innocent.

Geier: That’s what makes the case so disturbing ‒ is you see people trying really hard actually to make this case be a fair case and try to look at the evidence, and where is the proof that this man did this murder. But the system of justice was structured where that was not the question you could ask. The truth doesn’t matter.

Sottile: Oregon’s criminal justice system in the 1940s wanted Folkes dead, even if the facts didn’t support his conviction.

When we got on the phone, Geier didn’t know anything about Jesse Johnson. But as I read his book and spoke to him, I kept jotting down all the similarities between the Johnson case ‒ which was tried in 2004 ‒ and the Folkes case, tried 60 years before in 1944.

Sottile: OK. So here are the similarities between Jesse Johnson and Robert Folkes that I can deduce, and I’d just like to get your reaction to this. Both were Black men raised in Arkansas. Both did not live in Oregon. In both cases, a white military witness was seen as credible…

Just like how the Johnson case was built on the white helicopter pilot who saw a Black man near Harriet Thompson’s house, the Folkes case was also built on the word of a white, military man. The jury was all white women during the Folkes trial. The jury that decided Johnson’s fate was mostly white women, too.

Sottile: Notes from the investigators are actually written down much later from when the interviews actually occurred. And, as you just said, in both Johnson and Folkes, neither had a history of violence. So what does all that say to you?

Geier: Well, unfortunately, it tells me that things have not changed very much in Oregon, right?

Sottile: Geier said his research left him rattled. It changed his understanding of what Oregon says it is, versus what it really is.

Geier: It’s the facade of fairness. It’s a concerted effort in the court to pretend that race does not exist. There’s a picture in the book that shows Folkes sitting up in front with a sea of white faces behind him. There’s one Black man and a hundred white people in there. You can’t avoid the fact of race. It’s visible in that courtroom.

Sottile: In the end, Oregon executed Robert Folkes in the gas chamber. He was held down with leather straps as he thrashed and gasped. There’s a photo of this. And in the background of that photo, faces peer through a death chamber window, watching him die. Every one of them is white.

In 2022, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown made a surprise move in her final year in office. She commuted the sentences of the 17 people on death row, to life in prison without parole.

Jesse Johnson was one of them.

Gov. Kate Brown: The death penalty is immoral. Justice is not advanced by taking a life. And the state should not be in the business of executing people.

Sottile: This is Brown speaking to NPR.

Brown: The death penalty also has never been administered fairly, consistently or equitably in Oregon, or frankly across the United States. And what we know is that across the entire country, the death penalty has been disproportionately imposed upon people of color and people with mental illness.

Sottile: The death penalty has always functioned as the absolute end point of Oregon’s biased system. So, Brown’s move was surprising because it was the most definitive rejection to date of that system.

In the two years before Johnson was arrested ‒ 1996 and 1997 ‒ Oregon carried out its last executions. Both men were murderers who waived their appeals, which essentially forced the state’s hand.

And quite suddenly, Oregonians’ on-again, off-again affair with capital punishment became very real.

On the dates both men were slated to die, people gathered outside the State Penitentiary. There was a pro-execution crowd cheering and celebrating, almost like those public hangings that happened 80 years before.

And then there were anti-death penalty activists, standing quietly, holding candles.

Carl Kapocias was one of those people. He said that just after midnight, someone from the prison came outside.

Carl Kapocias: She came out and announced the people of Oregon have executed so-and-so. And I even get a chill thinking about that, the phrase “the people of Oregon,” knowing that I was a part of it. It’s the citizens of Oregon that carried out this execution. It wasn’t remote. It wasn’t someone apart from me.

Sottile: After that moment, Carl started writing to inmates on death row.

He got a pen-pal, someone he knew nothing about – a guy from Arkansas named Jesse Johnson. In 2004, they began writing letters back and forth.

Kapocias: He would write back, beautiful penmanship. Just really, really nice penmanship. No punctuation, but really beautiful penmanship. Very easy to read.

Sottile: In letters, Johnson described his life on death row. He called himself a loner. Johnson told Carl he was innocent, just as he told the other people on the row. He seemed to have an unwavering faith that one day that would become clear to the world.

Kapocias: I learned that he was never a saintly kind of guy. He wasn’t looking for trouble on the outside, he was just always looking for a good time. Where’s the party? What’s happening?

Sottile: Carl eventually visited Johnson in prison. They’d talk about sports mostly – how the Portland Trail Blazers were doing.

Once, Johnson confided in him that ‒ aside from his attorneys ‒ Carl was the only person coming to visit. Carl came to see him three or four times a year for 16 years.

Kapocias: He would tell me about growing up in Arkansas. There was one time when he was about 13 or 14, and he actually saved a person’s life. They were playing around the tracks, the railroad tracks.

Sottile: It’s that old story we told you at the start of this show – the one that people back home told about Johnson, and that in prison, Johnson was trying to hold on to. The story of who he really was.

Kapocias: And somehow, Jesse got him off. I don’t remember the exact details, but that kind of told me about Jesse and about the kind of person that he is.

Sottile: Around 2013, when Johnson’s case started having new appeals, Carl started going to those hearings. And he was struck by the way the court painted Johnson, this person he personally knew.

Kapocias: All they were caring about was getting their way and getting Jesse prosecuted and getting him even executed, really. And it was almost like a game.

Sottile: Their game locked Johnson up on death row, cut him off from the rest of the world, threatened his life. And yet, Johnson held onto his belief that one day he’d be free from Oregon.

During one of our first conversations with Johnson, we asked him about those last men Oregon executed in the ‘90s. He wasn’t there when those happened, but Johnson did tell us he met the man who was in charge of the executions.

Johnson:: At one time, the lieutenant at the Arkansas prison where I was at was warden at OSP.

Ryan Haas: What?

Johnson: Right before I got there. Yeah. A Black guy.

Sottile: What was his name?

Johnson: Thompson.

Sottile: OK.

Johnson: Thompson.

Haas: That’s crazy.

Johnson: And I remember when he was a lieutenant and somebody asked him, did he remember me? And he said, “I think so.”

Sottile: What Johnson was telling us was that the warden of the prison in Arkansas, where he did time before he came out west ‒ was Frank Thompson. Frank eventually moved to Oregon and became the head of the Oregon State Penitentiary. He was also the man who oversaw those last executions.

Jesse Johnson is a Black man from Arkansas who the state of Oregon intended to kill. And Frank Thompson is a Black man from Arkansas who killed people that Oregonians wanted dead.

It just seemed like a coincidence when Johnson told us, but it was actually a huge part of this story. We’d come to find out that Frank Thompson is one of the few people from Oregon’s criminal justice system who wants to reconsider who Jesse Johnson is.

When I first called Frank Thompson, he said he didn’t really want to talk about his time leading the Oregon State Penitentiary. He’s 81 years old, has a family – a life filled with better things to do than talking to reporters.

But when I told Frank we were working on a project about Jesse Johnson, his tone changed. I said we had serious questions about the Salem Police investigation and the way the prosecutors handled this case, which led to Johnson being sentenced to death.

He agreed to meet us.

On the kind of winter day Oregon is known for ‒ cloudy, a slow rain that seems to never end ‒ we met Frank in a meeting room at the Salem Public Library. He wore a red checkered flannel jacket and a disabled military veterans hat, leaned on a cane.

Our first question was the same first question we asked Jesse Johnson: What made him come to Oregon?

Frank Thompson: I was hired to put inmates to work. And by the way, we did that.

Sottile: In 1994, Oregon voters passed a ballot measure that said incarcerated people had to work 40 hours a week. Frank was the guy who made that law a reality.

He said the work program he launched has helped incarcerated people learn new skills.

Thompson: And that is really the star I’d like to see emblazoned on my monument when I..., but that won’t be it. I’ll be remembered as the one who executed two people.

Sottile: As superintendent, Frank was also in charge of executions. And he thinks about those men he was responsible for killing in 1996 and 1997 every day. Those deaths haunt him. A part of his past – the state’s past – he can’t escape. It’s why he was hesitant to talk to us.

Thompson: Too many people lean forward and listen to me and go, “What’s it like to kill somebody? How does it feel? What was going through your mind?” I’m repulsed, unfortunately.

Sottile: Oregon had to execute those men on death row when they abandoned their legal cases. Suddenly, the state’s extreme power to kill became reality. The last time Oregon executed anyone, it was in the gas chamber.

Thompson: Oregon hadn’t conducted an execution in over 32 years, so that meant that it was on my shoulders to put into place an appropriate execution process from scratch.

Sottile: This time, the state would use lethal injection. And right there in Oregon’s laws, it said that if the state had to execute someone, it was up to the prison superintendent to put together a plan.

Thompson: And that weight all of a sudden began weighing on me, because I was internalizing the magnitude of what I was responsible for. I was responsible for training all staff for the first time in over 32 years, being the first Black person over the largest penitentiary in the state.

Sottile: Frank had been a soldier, and so he treated this task like a mission.

Thompson: I developed an ability to go into this closet and focus on the objective and make up my mind, I’m going to get this done.

Sottile: He was in a kind of combat mode. But as he trained his staff, he could see the struggle everyone was trying to stuff down to get the job done. To this day, Frank feels he did what he had to do. And yet, the moral weight of it is inescapable. Eventually, it crashed down on him. Frank said he’s still dealing with that.

Thompson: The scars are continuing to reveal themselves in a more refined sociological, philosophical, personal sense. It strengthens my resolve to be against the death penalty. That’s a long answer, but there’s no short answer to your question. You can’t kill anybody with there being only one victim. Everybody’s a victim.

Sottile: As Frank spoke, we could hear him struggling to reconcile the stories of his own life. There’s the one where he is a Black man living inside a state with a racist foundation. And then there’s the other story where he is a career law man doing his duty for Oregon in charge of carrying out its ultimate penalty. But executions in the state’s past have been used to kill innocent Black men.

Thompson: There is a sanction that people who committed these kinds of crimes should, in my opinion, receive. But it’s not the death penalty. The death penalty is inhumane. It’s immoral.

Sottile: Frank wasn’t overseeing the prison anymore when Jesse Johnson was sentenced to death in 2004. He’d moved on to another Oregon prison by then. He told us that circumstances were the only thing that separated him and Johnson. They are both Black. Both from Little Rock, Arkansas. Both ended up in Salem. They were born 20 years apart – Frank to teachers, Jesse Johnson to teenage parents.

Thompson: We were both screened by the same system. And it could have been me. It could have been me.

Sottile: Just a few days before we met, Frank talked to Johnson on the phone.

Thompson: I said, “Well, I knew you were from Arkansas. Little Rock, aren’t you?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “but when you were a warden here in Arkansas, I knew you then.”

Sottile: This time when they spoke, they were on an equal plane. No longer a warden and an inmate, but two free men whose lives had been forever changed by the State of Oregon.

Frank asked Johnson if he would be willing to come back and speak to the Legislature about formally ending the death penalty in Oregon. We don’t know if that’s going to happen, but the power shift is striking. This time, it’s Johnson, the man no one listened to for so long, who has the power. Frank thinks Johnson can put Oregon on a new path – convince people here to dismantle the system he helped build. All Johnson would have to do, he thinks, is tell his story. Say he was innocent, and that no matter how many times he said it, Oregon tried to kill him.

Thompson: I am a spiritual person, and looking back over my having come to Oregon, I can’t help but say there’s a divine intervention of some sort that put me in a position to make a mark on this whole death penalty thing.

But Jesse nails it. Jesse nails it. He was sentenced to death and is a free man now. And wherever you find discrimination in a governmental system, kills it as having any merit. So I’m the messenger now, and Jesse is the message.

Sottile: Aliza Kaplan, the former innocence lawyer, told us that when Gov. Kate Brown commuted the sentences of the men on death row to life in prison without parole, that mostly resolved the issue. She said fully repealing at the ballot box would require an expensive political campaign, and a better use of that money would be more urgent criminal justice issues.

The state also recently passed a law that limited when the death penalty can even be applied. So, by today’s law, Johnson wouldn’t have been eligible for death with his conviction. But only Oregon voters could strike it from the state constitution for good.

I asked Frank about that.

Sottile: We’ve talked to people in the legal community who have said the death penalty is essentially useless in Oregon. It’s really, it’s in the state constitution, but it’s useless, so we don’t need to repeal it. I’m curious how you respond to that.

Thompson: Oh, within the past two years, Oregon got rid of all reference to slavery. That’s the end of my answer to that.

Sottile: In other words, Oregon’s racist past isn’t ancient history. In 2022, more than 680,000 people voted to preserve language in the state constitution allowing slavery as a form of punishment. Let that sink in for a moment.

I think it needs to be pointed out that the one person from Oregon’s criminal justice system who is willing to be reflective about Jesse Johnson’s case and what it means for Oregon is someone whose life story looks the most similar to his on paper – a Black man from Arkansas who ended up in Oregon. Here is a man who thrived in the criminal justice system. And now he’s willing to say some of the things he did were wrong.

Oregon, as a state, isn’t willing to do that yet.

Right now, Johnson is hoping the state will pay him $1.6 million in restitution for the years he lost in prison. But attorneys for the state are likely to fight his wrongful conviction claim. They’re currently pushing back on several similar claims in cases where a full exoneration hasn’t happened.

We asked Oregon’s Department of Justice for comment, and they said they would pay anyone who is – quote – “actually innocent of the crime they were convicted of.”

And here’s the part of the show where we tell you about where everyone ended up. The lead prosecutor back in 2004 who tried the Johnson case, he got promoted. He’s at the Oregon Department of Justice now.

Johnson’s attorney, who the state decided gave him inadequate representation? He’s a judge in Marion County.

Detective Mike Quakenbush is retired. He was working on a new roof when we talked to him. Says he drives a Harley around on the weekends.

Detective Craig Stoelk said he’s moved on.

Most of the people we spoke to who were in the drug scene back then ‒ they told us how much they’re struggling, how this case ruined them.

And then there’s Jesse Johnson.

Every now and then over the year we worked on this project, I would call him to check in. We’d have short conversations, confirm this fact here, or that fact there. I didn’t want to bother him too much, make him dwell on the past. And those conversations always left me a little dumbfounded, because he isn’t dwelling on it. He’s not mad.

Johnson: No, I can’t. I’m not pissed about it. Especially now because it’s over with. So I’m moving on the best I can.

Sottile: Of course, he thinks about what happened to him all the time. But every day, he’s looking forward, not backward. He is finding a love life, dated a few women after he got to Arkansas, and wasn’t sure about his next steps.

Johnson: She wanted me to move in. I don’t think I want to move in just yet. She got two teenage boys and we cool, but I don’t think I want to move in yet to pay no bills. Want to pay my own bills for a while.

Sottile: Johnson wants Oregon to pay him. He turned 63 years old since we started working on this podcast, and finding a job would be hard. When I asked him questions about what freedom was like, his answers were pretty brief. He was worried about money. But mostly, he would say he was just chillin’.

What have you been up to today, Jesse? Chillin’. Do you have plans for Christmas? Just chillin’.

Most times when I called, he was in the car driving around, or stopping to buy cigarettes.

One time, I reached him right before Thanksgiving.

Sottile: It’s pretty cool. you get to spend this holiday season out with your family and back home. It must be so liberating for you.

Johnson: Oh yes, home cooked food.

Sottile: Yeah. And like a real bed, right? And friends. And you can do whatever you want. You can drive around.

Johnson: Yep.

Sottile: That’s awesome, man.

Johnson: That’s what I’ve been doing, too.

Sottile: Over and over he told me nothing looks the same. He was back home in Little Rock, but Little Rock had changed so much since he left in the ‘90s. If anything bothered him, it was this.

Johnson: Oh man, a few of the places I be going to, I be going twice a week and I still haven’t got it yet.

Sottile: Still, he always found his way home again, back to the house where he was staying with his cousin.

Johnson: I just drive around and look at the new scenery. I stay on the go all the time. I stay on the go. They’ve been… my people have been complaining about me not staying at home.

Sottile: Why do you think you want to be on the go so bad?

Johnson: Well, I stay with two cousins, two females. The youngest one, she acts like she is mama. She means well.

Sottile: Yeah.

Johnson: “Ain’t nothing in the streets. Ain’t nothing in the streets but trouble.” Well, I ain’t in the streets. I’m in the car, and I’m driving and I ain’t stopping and I ain’t doing nothing wrong.

Sottile: I bet everybody just feels like it’s so amazing that you’re out, they just probably feel like people want to protect you, right? They’re afraid.

Johnson: Yeah. That’s mostly her. That’s mostly her there.

Sottile: Yeah. yeah. I mean, I guess I can understand that, but I also wonder, do you feel like you just want to be on the move because you were stuck in one damn place for so long.

Johnson: I think that’s it. I think that’s it.

Sottile: That makes sense to me.

Johnson: Yeah. I try to explain that to them, but well, you’re free now. You can go anytime. You ain’t got to go every day.

Sottile: Johnson is not imprisoned by Oregon’s story about him. Way back in 2004, he told the court that convicted him, I’m innocent. And then he waited for everyone to catch up to what he knew was true. He’s still waiting.

As we talked, it was hard not to think, though, about his reality. He’s out of prison, sure. And that’s amazing. But the state of Oregon still took so much of his life away from him. Locked him in a box and kept him there. And now he’s a 63-year-old man crashing with family, worrying about how he’ll pay his bills. The last job he had was in a prison laundry. And before that, he cleared trays in a cafeteria.

Johnson’s case isn’t some bug of Oregon’s system. It’s the system. It has historically taken the lives of Black men, killing them or simply taking their days away slowly. Dictating the terms of their lives as if to say, how dare you come here? How dare you set foot in this place?

And now Johnson is still dependent on Oregon. He is waiting for the state to pay him. And without that money, he is idle. He drives the same streets he grew up on over and over. Tries to memorize the look and feel of his new, old home. Along the way, he stops for smokes, then keeps going.

He has this urge to keep moving, to stay moving. The scenery changes. And Johnson drifts with it. He’s not aimless, or lost.

He’s just trying to be free.