Peter Carlisle
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Peter Benson Carlisle is the Prosecuting Attorney of Honolulu in the state of Hawaii.
Carlisle was born in 1952 in Ridgewood, New Jersey. He attended Kent School in Connecticut and pursued an undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in Psychology and English, he applied and was accepted to the UCLA School of Law.
Peter Carlisle's first experience with prosecution in Hawaii came in a work/study program where he took a job at the Honolulu prosecutor's office. After receiving his Juris Doctor degree from UCLA, he was recruited as a deputy prosecutor for the City and County of Honolulu. He remained in that job for over a decade attaining the responsibility of chief of the Career Criminal Unit.
In 1988, Carlisle went into private practice for the Honolulu law firm of Shim, Tam, Kirimitsu, Kitamura and Chang where he worked for eight years. In 1996 he made the decision to run for Prosecuting Attorney of the City and County of Honolulu.
[edit] Elections
Peter Carlisle’s opponents in 1996 were defense attorney and three-year deputy prosecutor David Arakawa and former deputy prosecutor and Liquor Commission administrator Randal Yoshida. Keith Kaneshiro who was Prosecuting Attorney since 1988 endorsed David Arakawa. David Arakawa came out ahead of Carlisle in the primary, but did not win over 50% of the vote in the September election to win outright. Carlisle steadily gained in the polls after the September Primary and beat Arakawa in the November runoff in the general election.
Political analysts credited Carlisle’s more extensive experience as a deputy prosecutor, his independence from political parties, and his performance in televised debates as reasons for winning. Carlisle ran unopposed in 2000 for a second four-year term as Prosecuting Attorney.
In the 2004 Hawaii Primary Election, former Honolulu Prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro challenged Carlisle. Carlisle received 58.4% of the vote as opposed to Kaneshiro's 34.1%.
[edit] Prosecuting Attorney
Along with administrating the Honolulu Prosecutor’s Office, Carlisle personally prosecuted several cases during his term including the mass murder trial of Byran Uyesugi who shot and killed seven of his co-workers at a Xerox warehouse in Honolulu. The jury found Uyesugi guilty of First Degree Murder.
Carlisle held faculty positions as an adjunct professor with the University of Hawaii System William S. Richardson School of Law, at the National Institute for Trial Advocacy and at the National Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina. He is a member of the board of directors of the National District Attorney’s Association and in 2002 was awarded the MADD National Criminal Justice Award.
