Peter B. Carlisle
It’s a long, long way from Ridgewood, New Jersey, to Honolulu, Hawaii—geographically, demographically and meteorologically—but Peter B. Carlisle has made the journey and transition with ease.
Looking at his official photo, with Carlisle wearing a multi-colored Hawaiian shirt (he also often wears his “trademark” navy blue baseball cap bearing the seal of the prosecuting attorney of Honolulu city and county), one gets the distinct impression that here is a man who is where he wants to be and doing what he wants to do.
“I love that hat,” Carlisle told a newspaper interviewer, who wrote, “This is the guy, after all, who back in UCLA law school was known to his friends as ‘Peter the Prosecutor.’ Some lawyers’ personalities make them natural defenders. Not Carlisle.”
After spending a decade working under three prosecuting attorneys before being elected to the top job in 1996 as a non-partisan candidate, Carlisle recalls, “When I saw (the title) ‘Prosecutor Carlisle’ in the paper after the election, I thought ‘This is the way my world is supposed to be.’ ”
Today Prosecuting Attorney Carlisle, a member of NDAA’s Board of Directors, oversees a staff that ranges between 250 and 260, including 105-110 attorneys, in a jurisdiction whose population of 880,000—encompassing the entire island of Oahu—is one of the most racially diverse in the world.
Carlisle says while maintaining racial and ethic diversity may be a concern in offices on the mainland, “That’s simply not a problem here,” where the population is a mix of Asian (the majority), Polynesian and Caucasian backgrounds.
“More than 50 percent of the marriages here are interracial,” he explains, “so in many ways this is not so much a melting pot as a stew of all sorts of people and different races and cultures, all living side by side. We have a pretty good history of doing that well.”
As much as he loves prosecution, Carlisle had to make a painful choice in 1988, when he was a deputy prosecuting attorney and his boss was defeated in an election. “I didn’t want to work for the new boss,” he says, so he quit and went to work for a Honolulu law firm.
Eight years later, with Carlisle and his wife Judy earning a comfortable joint income, the prosecution bug, never dormant, bit. Carlisle wanted to run for prosecuting attorney. If he was elected, it would mean that Judy would have to quit her customer relations job at Xerox, where she had worked for 20 years, because it didn’t provide the flexibility for her to drop off and pick up their two children, then 11 and 8, at school, while her husband’s law firm job allowed him to do that. As prosecuting attorney, Peter Carlisle’s time would not be his own.
Moreover, if Peter Carlisle ran for prosecuting attorney and won, not only would the Carlisles’s family time diminish, but their family income would drop by 50 percent.
“While the private sector work was an invaluable experience,” Peter Carlisle says, “I realized how much I missed prosecution, and how much happier I would be in prosecution, where you would have a community-wide impact, rather than a case-by-case impact. So my wife and I talked about it. I told her: ‘I’m ready for my mid-life crisis. Should it be a Harley Davidson or should I run for elective office?’ She said, ‘Well, the motorcycle will probably kill you, so go ahead and run for elective office, because I know how much you’re interested in it.’ ”
Running the second largest law office in Hawaii (only the state attorney general’s office is larger), Carlisle still personally prosecutes some major cases. His criteria for choosing which cases he’ll prosecute include the significance of the case and how appropriate and helpful it would for the case to have what he calls “the head guy” lead the prosecution team. Also, he says, “I always wanted to try a (murder) case that didn’t have a body, and the opportunity came up once.”
He personally, and successfully, prosecuted the biggest mass murder case in Hawaii’s history, known locally as the Xerox massacre. On Nov. 2, 1999, Byran Uyesugi, a Xerox copy machine repairman harboring mounting anger and hatred over presumed slights by fellow employees, went on a rampage with a semiautomatic handgun, killing seven male co-workers. At the trial, the defendant’s attorney raised the insanity defense, but Carlisle convinced the jury that Uyesugi “pumped 25 bullets into unarmed men and deliberately, methodically and maliciously became a mass murderer.” Uyesugi was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Carlisle admits, “I’m not enthusiastic about a couple of things you have to do in this job, and one of them is campaigning.” Despite this reservation, he spearheaded a successful campaign in Oahu for a constitutional amendment that would replace the traditional grand jury and preliminary hearing system with a document-generated information system. This, he says, “will have an enormous impact in terms of speed of trial and treating victims more fairly. It has taken years to bring this about.” However, three obstacles remain: The legislature hasn’t yet passed enabling legislation, the ACLU is suing and the criminal defense bar has appealed the vote, contending that the pro-amendment campaign by Carlisle’s office was inappropriate and unfair.
Carlisle’s response: “We drafted it (the amendment) and we went out and raised money so we could have TV commercials on it. We had signs on the roads, urging people to vote ‘Yes’ on the amendment. So it was like another political campaign. It’s not my favorite activity, but that’s what you need to do to try to make fundamental changes in a system that, to my mind, is flawed.”
| Carlisle On NDAA
“I’d like to get a plug in for NDAA,” said Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Peter B. Carlisle during an interview for a profile in The Prosecutor. “Even during the Xerox (mass murder) trial we used one of Jim Polley’s famous e-mail requests.
“We faced a formidable defense expert witness, who had been involved in the Jeffrey Dahmer case and the case involving the shooting of President Reagan. He testified in the Xerox case that, basically, the defendant was legally insane. We put out an e-mail to get information from people who had been confronted by this expert witness before. And I received this incredible transcript from Gary Lacey (NDAA Board member Gary E. Lacey, county attorney of Lancaster County, Nebraska).
“The case that Gary Lacey cited was factually similar to our case, but in the Nebraska case the expert witness had reached the conclusion that the defendant was sane because he was not suffering from a mental disorder or defect that substantially impaired his capacity to tell right from wrong or his ability to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law. This was the same guy (who later testified that the Xerox killer was legally insane.) So it was phenomenally helpful in preparing for the cross-examination of this formidable expert witness. I was so happy with Gary Lacey that I gave him a Honolulu prosecutor’s cap to thank him for what he did.”
“I think that the absolute diamond that has come from NDAA,” Peter Carlisle says, “is the Ernest F. Hollings National Advocacy Center. It’s a facility that shows so much foresight by the people who put it together, and its execution under Tom Charron has been extraordinary. It’s not easy to get from Honolulu to Columbia, South Carolina. It’s a long and tortuous trip. And yet our people here who have attended programs at the advocacy center rave about it and want to go back.”
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In interviews with several Hawaii newspapers, Carlisle has said that many of his values stem largely from his family upbringing back in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where he grew up the second of three children and where his father, an editorial writer for the Passaic Herald-News and a newspaperman for 40 years “had a very strong sense of what is right and what is not right.” He says, “My father had a big brain and was in a job where he had a lot of facts, so it was a rare day when I even came close to winning an argument with him.”
Carlisle attended the private Kent School in Connecticut, and then enrolled in the University of North Carolina, majoring in psychology and English. He became interested in a law career while watching the Watergate hearings on TV and was especially influenced by the late Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the investigating committee, who played a dramatic role in the proceedings.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he headed for the UCLA law school, which had a work/study program in which students worked for a quarter of a semester in a law office. He recalls: “I had two choices, go to Alaska and work in a public defender’s office at $2,500 a month or come to Hawaii and work in the prosecutor’s office for $600 a month. That decision is the only event known to nature that occurred faster than the speed of light.”
As one of the most popular public officials in Hawaii, Carlisle is often asked whether he has ambitions for any other public office, such as mayor, governor, congressman or U.S. senator.
His consistent reply has been: “No, no and no again.” He declares, “I don’t want to go to Washington, DC. I like Hawaii. I think that being a mayor or governor involves a lot more compromise than I’m interested in getting stuck with.”
As for his future as prosecuting attorney, Peter Carlisle, 51, is candid. “I think there’s a shelf life to this job. I don’t see myself dying in the saddle, so to speak. It has been eight years now in this job and I’m certainly convinced that I’ve got at least four more useful years ahead of me. At least I hope so. After that, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I hope that there’s going to be something out there for me and I suspect that something will turn up.”
Sources for this article, in addition to interviews, included the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Honolulu Advertiser and Midweek newspapers.
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