This story was produced in partnership with KOSU.

If you’ve sat at a desk or table in a government office in Oklahoma, there’s a chance it came from the furniture factory where Wayne Thompson works as a manager at Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington. 

Thompson, 57, tries not to get his hopes up about his next upcoming parole hearing on Oct. 7. After decades of rejections from the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, he calls the process “death every three years.” 

He would like to eat at IHOP if he ever gets out of prison. 

“They can put chocolate chips in the pancakes,” he said, leaning over the prison visiting room table, his voice full of longing. 

After more than 40 years in prison, Thompson’s hair has thinned and turned almost completely white, but his smile is the same in photographs of the 5-foot-2, 100-pound teenager who was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 1983 for killing his older sister’s abuser. Thompson was 15 years old at the time of the murder. His death sentence was later overturned in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and Thompson’s punishment was commuted to life with the possibility of parole. 

The prison sits on a country road surrounded by green rolling hills, but there isn’t much to look at behind the razor wire. Thompson said he doesn’t care to look out of the windows very often because the view is always the same.  

Thompson could barely read when he was arrested. In prison, he earned his GED and an associate degree, took computer courses, attended 12-step meetings and learned how to drive a forklift. He has struggled with addiction in the past and correctional officers caught him with drugs in 2016, according to prison records. Thompson said he has been sober since 2019.

Besides that, he has stacked up years of good conduct in prison and positive work evaluations. But the Pardon and Parole Board has voted against recommending him for parole every three years for the past two decades.

A part-time parole board and thousands of cases 

The Pardon and Parole Board has the power to approve parole for people convicted of nonviolent crimes. But those convicted of violent offenses go on to do a personal interview with the board. The board then decides whether to pass along a recommendation for parole to the governor’s office. Only the governor can grant parole to people convicted of violent crimes in Oklahoma. But many get rejected during the first stage of the process. 

Sue Hinton, a retired journalism professor, has been advocating for people behind bars at the Pardon and Parole Board for the past five years. She sits in the front row with a pen and paper at most of the monthly meetings, recording how the board votes. There’s rarely any discussion about prisoners in the first stage of the parole process. 

“They will vote on each person. It takes less than 30 seconds,” Hinton said. 

Hinton helped Thompson write a letter asking the board to consider him for release. His family and friends have written letters of support too, but there are hundreds of cases and letters for the part-time board to read each month. 

The board reviewed 5,526 cases of people seeking parole, pardons and commutations during the 12-month period ending in June, an average of 460 cases a month. The board recommended parole for just 7.4% of people convicted of violent crimes during that period. It’s still an increase over the 4.5% the  board recommended during the previous year. 

The Pardon and Parole Board will frequently reject people who have had incidents of serious misconduct in prison in the past year out of concerns for public safety, said Tom Bates, executive director for the agency. The board rejected 27% of people convicted of violent crimes who were up for parole at its last meeting for this reason, according to numbers Bates provided. The board also considers the rights of victims and whether a prisoner has completed drug treatment or other programs before voting to recommend parole, he said. 

A Pardon and Parole Board investigator meets with prisoners and examines their job prospects, prison disciplinary record, what rehabilitation programs they have completed and makes a recommendation to the board on whether a person is a good candidate for release. 

The investigator didn’t recommend parole for Thompson this year “due to the nature

and circumstances of the crime.” The recommendation was the same in 2021. 

The investigator’s recommendations aren’t binding and the board sometimes votes against the findings in investigation reports, Bates said. 

Grady County District Attorney Jason Hicks also wrote a letter to the Pardon and Parole Board  asking it to reject Thompson due to the violent nature of his crime. 

Thompson plans to live with a family friend in his hometown if he’s released. He has a job lined up at a salvage yard. But the Pardon and Parole Board investigator who interviewed Thompson in August wrote in his report that he didn’t have any employment options and hoped to go to truck driving school. This and other portions of the report were identical from Thompson’s last parole investigation three years ago. 

Bates said he couldn’t comment on the investigation report for a prisoner who the board is currently considering for parole. But he disputed that the 2024 report contained much of the same text as the 2021 report. Additional questions have been added to the form since that time and some information doesn’t change much from year to year, he said. 

“Investigators rely on answers provided by the offender to inform the Board concerning the offender’s post-release plan,” Bates said in a statement. 

It’s not uncommon for the investigators to reuse blocks of the same text from previous reports, said Madison Boone, an attorney from Project Commutation, an Oklahoma-based nonprofit that provides legal representation to people at the Pardon and Parole Board. 

If Thompson can pass the first stage and get a personal interview with the board, his chances of a favorable recommendation to the governor increase. But few make it to that point, Boone said.

A pending federal lawsuit claims Oklahoma’s parole process is unconstitutional for people serving life sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles because there is no requirement for the board to take a person’s age at the time of the crime into account. Courts have recognized in recent years that juveniles’ brains aren’t fully developed, and they have a greater capacity for rehabilitation. 

Parole board members can take a person’s age into consideration as one of any number of factors, but there is no scoring system, Bates said. 

Years of abuse

Thompson drank regularly and smoked pot by age 12. His school placed him in special education classes and he dropped out by the 8th grade. All of his early role models were criminals, he said. 

“Everyone I knew was either alcoholic or a drug addict or very closely related to an alcoholic or a drug addict, and so that’s just the environment I grew up in,” Thompson said. 

Thompson’s sister Vickie Mann lives in a small white house in Chickasha not far from where they grew up. They were raised in a family of eight siblings in a rough neighborhood. 

The walls of Mann’s living room are lined with photographs of her brother, competing in prison rodeos and baseball games as a younger man. She shakes her head looking at more recent pictures of an aging Thompson.

“He’ll be an old man by the time they let him out,” she said.

Mann is tiny, standing not even five feet tall. She was 15 years old when she married 18-year-old Charles Keene. He was addicted to huffing paint and couldn’t hold down a job, Mann said. Keene regularly beat her and once threatened her with a gun while she was seven-and-a-half months pregnant, according to court testimony.  

Mann said she worked as a waitress, built trailer homes and milked cows to survive. Eventually, she saved up enough money to buy her own trailer, where she raised their two sons. But Keene wouldn’t leave her alone, even after she filed for divorce, she said.

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“If Wayne hadn’t intervened, I’d probably be dead,” she said. 

Keene gave Mann black eyes and broken ribs, but the police didn’t do much when she called, she said. Police rarely made arrests for domestic violence in those days. Keene also had a cozy relationship with the cops, Mann said. 

“Whenever they wanted to know something about what was going on in our little area, they’d pick him up for sniffing paint, take him to jail,” she said. “He’d tell him what they wanted to know, and they’d let him go.”

Thompson grew up fearing Keene. His first memory of Keene attacking his sister is from when he was about eight years old. Keene would beat Thompson too when he tried to protect her, he said. 

Donetta Bradford, Thompson’s girlfriend in 1983, said they both experienced domestic abuse at home growing up. 

“It was just accepted back then,” she said. 

She believes that Thompson would be considered a victim of domestic violence today. 

“We were just a couple of poor kids trying to make it in that world,” she said. 

One freezing night in January 1983 after drinking, smoking pot and taking pills, Thompson decided to put an end to Keene’s abuse. He and a group of men including his older brother beat Keene, hog-tied him and tossed him into the trunk of a car. They drove to a bridge over the Washita River, where Thompson admits he shot Keene in the head. Thompson and his friend Bobby Glass chained Keene to a cement block and waded his mangled body into the icy river, according to Thompson’s account. Thompson used a pocket knife to slash Keene’s body hoping that the turtles and fish would eat it. 

Thompson returned home shaking and dripping wet that night and announced that his sister wouldn’t have to worry about Keene anymore, according to testimony from his trial.

Law enforcement fished the body out of the muddy river about three weeks later. 

Former Grady County District Attorney Tony Burns has been out of office for decades but still practices law. He was surprised but glad to learn that Thompson was still in prison. 

“I don’t know the person you seem to be so concerned about now — I don’t know who that person is,” Burns told The Frontier and KOSU. “I know who the person was at the time. He was a real smart aleck, smart ass. He thought he was really bad.” 

Burns prosecuted Thompson and three other men for Keene’s death in separate, back-to-back first-degree murder trials in Grady County. Four jurys returned four guilty verdicts and recommended death for all four defendants. Burns believed Thompson deserved the death penalty because he already had a  juvenile criminal record. Thompson’s mother once called the police because she was afraid of him when he was high on drugs and he had stabbed another teenager outside of a local diner, according to court testimony.  

Thompson and his brother are the only two people who remain in prison for Keene’s murder.  Glass was stabbed to death weeks after arriving on death row in 1984. Their friend Richard Jones’ death sentence was overturned and he was acquitted after a second trial. Thompson testified that Jones was drunk and passed out in the car during the killing. Anthony Mann, Thompson’s brother, is serving life without parole after a second trial. Thompson maintains that he is responsible for killing Keene and that his brother tried to talk him out of it. 

The baby case

After Thompson landed on death row, Rick Tepker, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, began to hear about what people were calling “the baby case.” Other attorneys had turned the case down, but Thompson’s youth seemed like an opportunity for Tepker to challenge the lack of age limits on capital punishment in the United States. He took Thompson’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1988 that executing a person for a crime they committed under the age of 16 was unconstitutional. 

After the decision, Thompson’s death sentence was commuted to life with the possibility of parole. 

Court documents from the 1988 Thompson v. Oklahoma U.S. Supreme Court case on display at the University of Oklahoma Law Library. 

Tepker believed Thompson would be released on parole while he was still a young man. He thinks Thompson deserves a second chance at freedom. 

“Wayne has pretty much done everything you need to do in order to put your life together,” Tepker said. 

But Thompson has been going up for parole since the mid-1990s without success. 

Thompson did make it through the second stage of the parole process once, in 2003, but Gov. Brad Henry later rejected his release. Tepker doesn’t know why, but said someone from the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office told him that it just wasn’t “in the stars for Wayne to get out right now.”

It was a devastating blow for Thompson. 

“I thought then and still think to some extent that it was probably my only chance of ever getting out,” he said. 

Thompson got through the first stage of the parole process again in 2009. The Pardon and Parole board interviewed him, but did not recommend release. 

“They asked me my name and number and no other questions,” he said. 

He can’t change the facts of his crime even if four decades in prison have changed him, he said. 

“Nothing I can do to change that, no matter how bad I feel about it or how much remorse I have, I can never change what happened.”

If Oklahoma doesn’t release him this time, Thompson will be up for parole again in 2027, when he will be 60 years old.