MADISON, Wis. (AP) - The government will pay more than $750,000 to a man who was imprisoned 25 years for a University of Wisconsin-Madison student’s death before his conviction was overturned.
The award settles a civil rights lawsuit brought by Ralph Armstrong, who was convicted for the 1980 rape and murder of 19-year-old Charise Kamps, the Wisconsin State Journal (https://bit.ly/2jYxigR ) reported.
The state of Wisconsin will pay $150,000, and the city of Madison will pay $600,000 under one of the two agreements in the suit. The amount Dane County will pay to Armstrong, specified in a separate agreement, isn’t known because the agreement wasn’t made public.
The agreement pertains to alleged misconduct by a city of Madison police detective and a state Crime Lab DNA analyst. It was released Monday after a stipulation to dismiss Armstrong’s lawsuit was entered in U.S. District Court on Friday.
Armstrong, 64, is imprisoned in New Mexico on unrelated sexual assault convictions prior to the Kamps case, according to the New Mexico Corrections Department’s website.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned his conviction in the Kamps case in 2005 after DNA tests excluded him as a suspect in the woman’s death.
Prosecutors sought a conviction against Armstrong until 2009, when a reserve judge dismissed the charges against him after ruling that investigators had mishandled evidence as they prepared to retry him. Agreements were reached with retired State Crime Lab DNA analyst Karen Daily, retired Madison police Detective Marion Morgan and retired Assistant District Attorney John Norsetter.
Armstrong filed his civil rights lawsuit without the help of an attorney in 2012.
In May 2013, he hired Loevy & Loevy, a Chicago-based civil rights law firm, to represent him. Armstrong lawyer Mark Loevy-Reyes declined the newspaper’s request for comment on the settlement, citing a confidentiality clause in one of the agreements.
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Information from: Wisconsin State Journal, https://www.madison.com/wsj
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