Miscarriage of justice costs man decades of his life
Just before midnight in a Madison, Wis., courtroom, a weary jury convicted an Albuquerque man of the gruesome murder and rape of a 19-year-old college student, a crime that had chilled the community and played out in the headlines since the young woman’s bloody, nude body was found June 24, 1980, in her apartment.
Two days after being convicted, Ralph Armstrong, then 28, was sentenced to life plus 16 years in prison.
In closing arguments, prosecutor John Norsetter had chided Armstrong for trying to convince the jury of his innocence.
“I’ve never seen a bigger pack of lies in a courtroom,” he told jurors. But it wasn’t Armstrong who was lying. And it wasn’t until Armstrong had
already served 29 years in prison before the lies and missteps were uncovered, and advances in DNA technology would lead to his exoneration.
Even then, because of a harsh decision by the New Mexico parole board, freedom was still years away.
The story of Ralph Armstrong is the stuff of Kafkaesque nightmares, a John Grisham novel told in hundreds of pages of court documents and in a myriad of Madison newspaper articles that span nearly 40 years.
A handful of Albuquerque Journal articles in 1972 — the only time his story has trickled out locally until now — briefly detail how at age 19 he and three youths had terrorized women by chasing them down and gang-raping them at knifepoint during a fourmonth drunken and debauched summer spree.
Armstrong pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual assault and was given an indeterminate sentence of 30 to 150 years.
Records show he was a model prisoner, undergoing counseling and sex offender treatment and graduating summa cum laude in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the College of Santa Fe.
That earned him parole in 1979 and a fully paid fellowship in the graduate program of psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a place he told the parole board he chose because he “just happened to like the area.”
The first year of his second chance went well. His good grades were enough to renew his fellowship for the coming year. He worked part-time at a shoe store, had friends and got engaged to a young woman named Jane.
That all changed that summer.
On June 22, 1980, his younger brother, Stephen Armstrong, a 22-year-old Texas oil field worker, paid him a surprise visit.
On June 23, the brothers shared an evening of dinner, drinking beer, snorting a small quantity of cocaine and watching “M*A*S*H” on television with Jane, a few other friends and Jane’s coworker, Charise Kamps, a UW sophomore.
On June 24, Kamps was found dead, naked and face down in her blood-soaked bed with a bathrobe belt draped across her back. She had been strangled, beaten and sexually assaulted.
Madison police quickly identified Ralph Armstrong as the suspect. He had been the last known person to see Kamps alive, telling police that she had invited him up to her apartment for a beer as the night wound down.
And there was that incriminating criminal record in New Mexico.
The case against him moved quickly. Nine months after Kamps’ murder, he went to trial.
Prosecutor Norsetter relied heavily on semen stains found on Kamps’ bathrobe and hair found in her apartment that were consistent with Armstrong’s.
Traces of blood found underneath Armstrong’s nails could have belonged to Kamps, though Armstrong insisted that the blood was from a knee injury and showering with Jane during her period.
A neighbor also testified that she saw Armstrong going in and out of Kamps’ apartment, though defense attorneys argued that the neighbor had changed her story, recanted then reconfirmed it, after a mishandled hypnosis session.
Jurors took seven hours to find Armstrong guilty of firstdegree murder and sexual assault. But behind bars, he continued to declare his innocence, filing appeal after appeal, each denied.
In 1993, his case caught the attention of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people through DNA testing. Project lawyers argued that the bathrobe stain excluded Armstrong as the killer, and in 2001 advanced DNA testing also excluded him as the source of the hairs and another semen stain found on the bathrobe belt.
That convinced the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2005 to overturn his conviction and grant a new trial. But while preparing for the retrial, defense attorneys learned that additional testing ordered by Norsetter on the bathrobe belt had destroyed the remainder of the evidence, a violation of a court order.
In addition, defense attorneys learned that Norsetter had never told them about a phone call he had received in 1995 from a woman who said a man had confessed to Kamps’ rape and murder. A second woman had also heard the confession.
That man was Armstrong’s brother.
But Stephen Armstrong was long gone. Eight days after the conviction was overturned, he was found dead in his home in Tennessee.
In all the years his brother had languished in prison, Stephen had never contacted or visited him.
In July 2009, a judge dismissed all charges against Armstrong and chastised Norsetter for prosecutorial misconduct, opining that the “prosecution of Armstrong was a single-minded pursuit of an innocent man that let the real killer to go free.”
According to newspaper articles over the years, Norsetter has never stopped believing Armstrong is the killer.
Before Armstrong could go free, he was returned to New Mexico under a hold related to his parole from the 1972 conviction. A risk assessment conducted then rated him low risk for re-offending. But the parole board revoked his parole anyway, arguing that he had violated his conditions of release with the alcohol and cocaine he consumed the night before Kamps’ murder nearly 30 years before.
Molly Schmidt-Nowara, Armstrong’s Albuquerque attorney, filed a petition in July 2010 seeking to overturn the decision, calling it part of the unceasing persecution of her client over three decades and “one of the grossest miscarriages of justice in the annals of modern American law.”
“Under any rational notion of justice, 30 years of incarceration is more than enough punitive time for a relatively minor violation,” the petition stated.
Five months after filing the petition, the parole board relented, granting Armstrong his parole.
In April 2011, he walked out of the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility near Santa Rosa a free man — or as free as he will ever be.
Armstrong, now 65, is not scheduled to be released from parole until 2045 when he is 93. As part of his parole, he is required to register as a sex offender — a system that did not exist at the time of his conviction.
These days, Armstrong lives quietly in Albuquerque’s North Valley in a modest one-bedroom rental. He has never spoken publicly about the case. Efforts to contact him and his attorney were unsuccessful.
Last year, he settled a civil rights lawsuit against Norsetter and others for the way his case in Madison was mishandled. An article in the Wisconsin State Journal reported the sum of the settlement at $1.75 million.
But even that much money can’t buy back the lost years.
UpFront is a front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg.