Following the loss, DiSalle held a series of offices in the city government of Toledo, Ohio. He was assistant law director from 1939 to 1941.[1] In 1941, he was elected to the Toledo City Council;[1] the council selected him as vice-mayor in 1943 and 1945.[1]
DiSalle was elected as mayor of Toledo in 1947 and re-elected in 1949, and served from 1948 until his resignation on November 30, 1950, to accept a federal appointment.[1][4] During his mayoralty, Toledo fully re-paid its debts.[1]
In 1962, DiSalle lost re-election as governor to then-state auditorJim Rhodes,[15] 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]
DiSalle personally investigated all cases of people scheduled to be executed by electric chair and even personally met with some of them.[19] He agreed with Clinton Duffy, who said that murderers are more likely to be rehabilitated than other criminals.[18] "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.[18][20]
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".[21] 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".[18]
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.[18]
After leaving the governorship, DiSalle co-founded and served as a chairman of the National Committee to Abolish Federal Death Penalty.[21][22] 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.[23] 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".[24]
Electoral history
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In 1966, he joined the Washington, D.C., law firm of Chapman, Duff, and Paul.[2] In 1979, he co-founded the Washington, D.C., law firm of DiSalle & Staudinger.[2]
The same year, DiSalle also authored the book Second Choice, a history of the U.S. vice presidency.[25]
^ abcdefghijklLoftus, Joseph A. (December 1, 1950). "Key price job goes to Toledo's mayor; price stabilizer". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on July 22, 2018. Retrieved April 22, 2020. WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 --- President Truman named Mayor Michael V. DiSalle of Toledo, Ohio, today to be Director of Price Stabilization. ... He flew to Washington today, met Mr. [Alan] Valentine and President Truman, and then flew home to quit the Mayor's job. His term has another year to run. He was elected a [Toledo] City Councilman, and the Council elected him as Mayor. ... Mr. DiSalle was born in New York [on] Jan. 6, 1908. He has lived in Toledo since 1911. He attended the public and parochial schools there and was graduated from Georgetown University in 1931 with a Bachelor of Law degree. Notre Dame bestowed an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1949. He began his law career in Toledo as assistant district counsel of the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933 and served in that post for about two years. He was a member of the Ohio Legislature in 1937 and 1938 and was Assistant City Law Director from 1939 to 1941. He has been a member of the City Council since 1942 and served two terms as Vice Mayor before his election as Mayor in 1947 and again in 1949. During his service the city paid off its entire indebtedness. ... He is a Roman Catholic, is married and is the father of a boy and four girls, the oldest a student at St. Mary's College in Indiana.
^ abcdeZimmerman, Richard. Call Me Mike: A Political Biography of Michael V. DiSalle. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003. ISBN0-87338-755-4.
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