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Retired Dane County Circuit Judge William Byrne, who served in public office here for 35 years, died Wednesday in a Madison hospital.
Byrne,72, suffered a massive stroke at his Lake Monona home Tuesday morning and died at St. Marys Medical Center.
"I'd like to say that no one had more common sense or a better sense of humor than Bill Byrne," said Dane County Circuit Judge Daniel Moeser, the chief judge of the 5th Judicial District and a longtime colleague of Byrne's.
"He served with distinction on the Dane County bench as well as district attorney," Moeser added. "He was one of our better reserve judges and we will miss himvery much."
Byrne is the second member of Dane County's judicial family to die within a month's time. Circuit Judge George Northrup died of cancer on Sept. 10.
In his tenure on the bench, which stretched from 1964 until his retirement in 1988, Byrne handled a wide range of judicial cases, some of them precedent-setting.
His 1979 ruling in the long fight over the location of the new Madison Area Technical College was an important decision in environmental protection. Byrne also broke new groundin 1977 when he ruled that a woman could sue for property division in court even though she was not married to the man she had been living with.
He also presided over the murder trial of Joseph Paul Franklin, the self-styled racist who killed an interracial couple at East...