[media-credit name=’AJ MACLEAN/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]JUNEAU — Chalk up another victory for the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

The project, an initiative of the University of Wisconsin Law School, helped win the freedom of its third client Friday: former La Crosse resident and former Augusta police officer Evan Zimmerman, whose murder charge was dropped by prosecutor Richard White in Dodge County Court.

White’s motion ends a five-day retrial concerning the slaying of Zimmerman’s former girlfriend, Kathy Thompson, who was found strangled in Eau Claire in 2000. An Eau Claire jury convicted Zimmerman of first-degree murder in the case in 2001, but an appeals court overturned the conviction and ordered a retrial in 2003, deciding Zimmerman received ineffective counsel during his first trial.

The retrial was moved to Juneau in Dodge County due to the publicity the case garnered in western Wisconsin.

In deciding to dismiss the charge, White cited the inadmissibility of certain key evidence along with less effective witness testimony four years removed from the first trial.

“I concluded that because of the problems we’ve encountered as far as obtaining necessary evidence that [it’s] simply not a tenable situation to believe that I could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Zimmerman committed this crime,” White said.

Although not saying Zimmerman was innocent, White said he had an “ethical obligation” to drop the charge. With the jury having already been impaneled in the trial, Zimmerman may not be tried again for the crime.

The dismissal also marked the third time the innocence project, which provides counsel for select inmates with provable claims that they were wrongfully convicted, won the freedom of a client. The group of UW professors and law students previously helped exonerate Christopher Ochoa and Steven Avery, whose convictions for murder and sexual assault, respectively, were overturned through the use of DNA evidence.

But Zimmerman’s case represented the first time the project took a case to trial, and La Crosse attorney Keith Belzer was retained to assist in the defense.

Belzer afterward said the trial was the “closest you can get to an exoneration in the sense that the state wasn’t even finished with their case yet and realized there was no way they could prove guilt.”

He also said Zimmerman’s original conviction, based in part on what police saw as inconsistent statements the defendant made during questioning, proves the need for mandatory recording of police interrogations in the state.

“In this case, as I was working this week, I noticed time and again how two officers doing the same interview with Evan would write reports with important differences,” Belzer said. “Videotape is cheap. There’s no reason not to do it.”

Thompson was found dead the morning after she married Robert Miles, nine months after her relationship with Zimmerman ended. Police hypothesized Zimmerman committed the crime out of anger over the breakup of their relationship and Thompson’s subsequent marriage.

Wisconsin Innocence Project co-director Keith Findley said Zimmerman’s conviction followed a common theme of law enforcement tailoring evidence to fit a specific suspect.

“There’s sort of an overarching theme that attaches to almost all [wrongful convictions], and that is the problem of tunnel vision,” Findley said. “And I think this case is a remarkable example of that. There was no evidence against Evan Zimmerman — very, very little evidence. But early on the investigation locked on him and then everything that happened after that was filtered through this lens of trying to find guilt so everything that came in was interpreted as incriminating.”

An emotional Zimmerman, who spent three and a half years in prison, during which time he suffered a stroke, did not comment after the dismissal. But Findley, noting the toll the last five years have taken on the defendant, said, “He lost everything he had. So he’s got to rebuild now.”