#ralph armstrong

[longliverockback]

Mahavishnu Orchestra Visions of the Emerald Beyond 1975 Columbia ——————————————————————— Tracks: 01. Eternity’s Breath Part 1 02. Eternity’s Breath Part 2 03. Lila’s Dance 04. Can’t Stand Your Funk 05. Pastoral 06. Faith 07. Cosmic Strut 08. If I Could See 09. Be Happy 10. Earth Ship 11. Pegasus 12. Opus 1 13. On the Way Home to Earth ———————————————————————

Ralph Armstrong

Mahavishnu John McLaughlin

Gayle Moran

Jean-Luc Ponty

Michael Walden

* Long Live Rock Archive

[deniscollins]

If you were managing the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, what would be the appropriate compensation for a man imprisoned 30 years for a rape and murder he did not commit?

Ralph Armstrong, whose convictions for the 1980 rape and murder of a UW-Madison student were overturned, filed a $58 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the state of Wisconsin on Friday seeking compensation for about 30 years behind bars for the convictions.

Armstrong filed the lawsuit by mail from his prison cell in New Mexico, where he is serving a sentence for a parole violation for earlier criminal convictions in that state in the 1970s. The hand-written documents were filed by staff of the U.S. District Court in Madison late Friday afternoon.

Between June 24, 1980, and at least Aug. 26, 2009, Armstrong wrote in his lawsuit, various agencies that included the Madison Police Department, the Dane County District Attorney's Office and the State Crime Lab, by a "pattern of abusive conduct," violated his constitutional rights, "resulting in plaintiff's unjust, extreme and irreparable harm" by "false conviction for rape and murder."

Armstrong, 59, was convicted in 1981 of the murder of Charise Kamps. His conviction was overturned by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2005 after DNA tests on hair and semen excluded him as a suspect.

In 2009, Reserve Judge Robert Kinney dismissed the charges against Armstrong, who was then awaiting re-trial, after finding that now-retired Assistant District Attorney John Norsetter should have disclosed to Armstrong's lawyers a purported confession in 1995 by Armstrong's brother, Stephen Armstrong, which was reported to Norsetter by two women.

Kinney also said that a prosecution-ordered test in 2006 destroyed a semen stain on a key piece of evidence that could have eliminated Armstrong as a suspect.

Armstrong also asked for the appointment of a lawyer to represent him in the lawsuit, citing primitive conditions at the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility in Santa Rosa, N.M., that prevent him from keeping much of the voluminous case materials in his cell, or from doing adequate legal research.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb, Armstrong characterized his incarceration in New Mexico as "overly ancient, invalid, and essentially illegal" and predicated largely on the murder and rape convictions that have now been overturned.