Peter Benson Carlisle (born October 12, 1952) is an American politician and attorney who served as the 13th Mayor of Honolulu, Hawaii from 2010 to 2013. Prior to serving as interim Mayor following the resignation of former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann (in Hannemann's unsuccessful bid to run for Hawaii State governor against former U.S. Representative Neil Abercrombie), Carlisle had served as the Prosecuting Attorney of Honolulu from 1996 to 2010. Personal life 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 attended the UCLA School of Law. Carlisle first came to Hawaii in 1978 where he met and married Judy. Peter Carlisle's first experience with prosecution in Hawaii came in a work/study program with 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, mostly handling personal injury cases. In 1996 he ran for Prosecuting Attorney of the City and County of Honolulu and was elected. Carlisle is an opponent of capital punishment. While in office as prosecuting attorney he pushed for tougher sentencing laws and led a successful fight to amend the state constitution to allow for "information charging" and eliminate the requirement that victims and other witnesses testify during preliminary or grand jury hearings. He was later criticized by the Hawai'i Supreme Court for using taxpayer money to promote the constitutional amendment. Election history Peter Carlisle’s opponents in 1996 for the role of Honolulu Prosecutor 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