Former Dane County Circuit Court Judge Michael B. Torphy, regarded as one of the state’s finest trial judges when he retired in 1998, died Thursday in a Madison hospice center.
Torphy, 78, presided over numerous murder cases in his 30 years on the bench, including a stretch in the 1970s and 1980s when more than 20 consecutive homicide cases filed in Dane County were assigned to him.
(Torphy was a 1957 graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School.)