Jesse Johnson walked out of the Marion County Jail on Sept. 5, 2023, as a free man after 25 years behind bars in Oregon.

Two years later, he’s suing the state and the detectives who locked him up for a crime he always denied committing.

Salem Police Department Detectives Mike Quakenbush and Craig Stoelk arrested Johnson in 1998 for the murder of Harriet Lavern Thompson. He would spend the next quarter century, including 17 years on death row, locked up in Oregon.

Johnson, who is Black, was eventually released after an appeals court overturned his original conviction and prosecutors declined to bring new charges against him for Thompson’s killing.

His imprisonment, according to Johnson’s attorneys, was the result of flagrant racism, an effort to suppress exculpatory evidence and conspiracy among law enforcement to convict Johnson of the brutal crime.

Johnson’s lawyers have also filed a claim for compensation under an Oregon law that pays exonerees for each year they were wrongly incarcerated.

The city of Salem declined to comment for this story, citing the pending litigation.

‘Hush’ podcast plays role in lawsuit

Attorney David B. Owens, with the law firm Loevy & Loevy, filed the lawsuit against the city of Salem, its police department, Quakenbush, Stoelk and unknown Salem police officers who might have had a role in Johnson’s imprisonment.

Many of the areas of alleged wrongdoing are outlined in the first season of OPB’s “Hush” podcast.

Among the allegations, Owens notes that Quakenbush and Stoelk relied heavily on testimony from Donald “Shorty” Blocker, who alleged Johnson had confessed he “offed the bitch,” referring to Thompson. Blocker later retracted that allegation, as revealed in episode two of Hush, and told a defense investigator that the Salem police detectives coerced him into making the statement.

“If I answered them the way (Quakenbush) wanted me to answer them, then he would make sure no criminal charges were filed against me,” Blocker told the investigator. “He said they already had the guy in custody and wanted to put him away.”

Johnson’s defense team member then pressed Shorty about the “offed the bitch” story.

“I said what came out of Quakenbush’s mouth,” Shorty answered.

The lawsuit also notes witnesses who saw a white man leaving Thompson’s home in the early morning hours of March 20, 1998, shortly after Thompson was killed. One of those was a neighbor, Patricia Hubbard, who spoke to OPB in episode four of the podcast.

“In the early morning hours before the murder, there was screaming and yelling with obscenities,” Hubbard said in a June 2013 affidavit to Johnson’s defense team. “When it all stopped I saw a tall, white male with straggly hair go running from the scene.”

Listen to OPB's 'Hush' podcast series

Hubbard said a Salem police officer later came to her house and said they did not need her information because they knew a Black person had committed the crime. That officer used a racial slur, according to Hubbard.

OPB also tracked down a former newspaper carrier for the Salem Statesman Journal, Janelle Osborne, who was parked next to Thompson’s house on the morning she was killed. Osborne, too, said she saw a white man run from the house around the time of the murder.

“It’s so sad that somebody just lost 25 years of their life for something that they didn’t do, and for something that the police didn’t investigate very well,” Osborne said.

Despite the eyewitness accounts pointing to a white suspect, Johnson’s attorneys said the detectives had a laser focus on Johnson because he is Black.

“If the Salem Police Department actually had customs or policies that prohibited racist policing on the ground, Hubbard would not have been disregarded,” Owens wrote in his federal court filing.

He continued, citing further OPB reporting: “Indeed, to this day, Defendant Quakenbush openly defends targeting Johnson due to his Blackness rather than considering whether the perpetrator was a white man.”

Episode seven of Hush contained a 2024 interview with Quakenbush in which he said he was eager in 1998 to talk to a witness who reported seeing a Black man outside Thompson’s home because it helped him narrow down a pool of suspects in the predominantly white city.

“You don’t have a lot of Black folks in Salem, especially committing crimes,” Quakenbush said.

Oregon exonerees face ‘broken system’ of compensation for another year

During the recorded interview, Quakenbush repeatedly used racial slurs when discussing Black people and allegations he faced of being racially biased.

Damages

Oregon could potentially owe Johnson millions of dollars for his incarceration. Under a state law meant to compensate wrongly convicted people, Oregon must pay $65,000 for each year a person spent behind bars. In Johnson’s case, that could amount to more than $1.5 million owed.

Johnson’s lawyers have also petitioned the state to issue him a certificate of innocence and to seal his police reports and criminal records in his case.

In March, Oregon settled a nearly $2 million wrongful conviction case involving Frank Gable. He was convicted of the 1991 murder of Michael Francke by the same prosecutor’s office that handled Johnson’s case.

Gable was eventually cleared by a federal court that found evidence pointing to another suspect. Loevy & Loevy also represented Gable.

Beyond the state’s settlement, Johnson’s attorneys are seeking financial damages from the city of Salem and others, as well as all attorneys fees.

Johnson was taken into custody when he was 37 years old. Now in his 60s, he told OPB that he wanted to leave Oregon as quickly as possible after his release. He currently lives in his home city of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Since then, Johnson has returned to Oregon only once, as a guest speaker at a benefit for the Oregon Innocence Project in the fall of 2024. He stood on stage at that event wearing a shirt that read ‘This is Innocence" and raised his hands to the sky.

“I knew I was getting out,” he said before breaking down in tears, thanking the room of attorneys for never giving up on his case.

Leah Sottile contributed to this story.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/04/salem-police-detectives-sued-jesse-johnson/