Michael DiSalle

Governor of Ohio (1959–1963)

In 1956, DiSalle was the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, losing to then-state attorney general C. William O'Neill.^[10] In their 1958 re-match, DiSalle defeated O'Neill.^[11][12] The gubernatorial term had in 1954 been lengthened from two years to four years, starting with the 1958 election, so DiSalle served as governor from 1959 to 1963. In July 1959, DiSalle signed a bill designating "with God, all things are possible" as the official motto of Ohio after it passed the unanimously in the Ohio House of Representatives.^[13][14]

DiSalle was a favorite son candidate in the 1960 Democratic Party presidential primaries. He ran only in the Ohio primary, which he won with 60.25% of the vote against Albert S. Porter,^[15] who had run against him in the gubernatorial primary in 1958.^[11] Of the total popular vote in the primaries, DiSalle placed sixth behind the eventual nominee, Senator John F. Kennedy, as well as Governor Pat Brown, perennial candidate George H. McLain, Senator Hubert Humphrey, and Senator George Smathers.^[16]

In 1962, DiSalle lost re-election as governor to then-state auditor Jim Rhodes,^[17] after voters disapproved of several aspects of his administration, including his opposition to capital punishment, a tax increase, and a policy which billed wards of state for living necessities.^[4]

Opposition to capital punishment

DiSalle was an opponent of death penalty and commuted a number of sentences as governor.^[18][19] He allowed six of the 12 death sentences he reviewed as governor to proceed. DiSalle stated that despite being "totally opposed to the death penalty", he could not use his power of executive clemency without mitigating circumstances or evidence of miscarriage of justice. To do so would be to personally repeal the law providing for capital punishment in Ohio, and he might have been impeached for violating his oath of office, DiSalle wrote.^[20]

DiSalle personally investigated all cases of people scheduled to be executed by electric chair and even personally met with some of them.^[21] He agreed with Clinton Duffy, who said that murderers are more likely to be rehabilitated than other criminals.^[20] "To demonstrate his faith in rehabilitation, [DiSalle] made it a point to hire convicted murderers to serve on his household staff" at the Ohio Governor's Mansion.^[20][22]

One of DiSalle's primary concerns regarding the death penalty was that poorer defendants did not have the same access to counsel as rich defendants, and therefore would suffer the death penalty disproportionately. He recalled: "I found that the men in death row had one thing in common: they were penniless".^[23] They were defended in court by court-appointed attorneys, some without criminal legal experience. Professional criminals "did not have to depend on volunteers", DiSalle wrote. "Nor were they ever, in my experience, executed".^[20]

DiSalle believed that penology should be improved. Ronald Fenton, among the 12 cases he reviewed, had raped and murdered a baby. The governor believed that such acts had proved his insanity, but psychiatrists had found him sane. Although he believed that the M'Naghten Rule was flawed, because of the finding—and expecting that had he been commuted to life imprisonment "his prisonmates would have made his life unbearable"—DiSalle allowed the execution. He cited the case as an example of how the justice system had failed to study the behavior of a minor criminal to prevent him from committing murder.^[20]

After leaving the governorship, DiSalle co-founded and served as a chairman of the National Committee to Abolish Federal Death Penalty.^[23][24] His 1965 book, The Power of Life or Death, discusses this issue and chronicles his difficult experiences as the man charged with making the final decision regarding a sentence commutation.^[25] He is quoted in the book Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution as saying, "No one who has never watched the hands of a clock marking the last minutes of a condemned man's existence, knowing that he alone has the temporary Godlike power to stop the clock, can realize the agony of deciding an appeal for executive clemency".^[26]