There's a reason liberals don't want folks talking about Louis Butler's record.

The article below appeared in On Wisconsin, the magazine of the UW Alumni Association. Justice Louis Butler is an alumnus of the UW Law School. Butler wrote the ruling that oveturned the conviction of Ralph Armstrong. Justice Butler's ruling is linked here along with the dissent.

An article, penned by John Allen, describing the case in detail, appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of the magazine of the Wisconsin Alumni Association. The first several paragraphs appear below; read the complete article here; it's important. 

History Overturned

Twenty-five years after one of the UW’s most brutal crimes, changing science is turning a settled history into an open question: will we ever know who killed Charise Kamps?

On July 12, 2005, Madison lost a sense of certainty. On that date, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Ralph Armstrong MS '79, stripping the ending from the understood narrative of one of the most brutal crimes in the university’s history.

Twenty-five years earlier, on June 24, 1980, the body of Charise Kamps UW ’83 had been discovered, bloody and naked, in her West Gorham Street apartment. She had been beaten, raped, and strangled. Justice moved swiftly, however: Armstrong was in custody that very day.

For those attending the UW then, and for Madison in general, the murder dominated the summer. Reports on the investigation ran on the front pages of city and university newspapers until the arrest was made public in July. At the time, the CapitalTimes wrote that the crime “shocked women across the city.” But their shock must have been assuaged in March 1981, when Armstrong was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a term of life plus sixteen years. During the trial, the prosecution used two important pieces of physical evidence — semen and hair samples — to link him to the crime scene. The state used the best science available at the time, but forensic labs had no way of identifying evidence based on DNA then. Today they do, and analysis shows that neither the semen nor the hair came from Armstrong....