Frank J. Battisti

American judge

Frank Joseph Battisti (October 4, 1922 – October 19, 1994) was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. Battisti's career featured groundbreaking—and sometimes controversial—rulings, notably his finding in 1976 that the Cleveland public school system was guilty of racial segregation. Two years earlier, in 1974, he dismissed a case against eight members of the Ohio Army National Guard accused of violating the civil rights of four Kent State University students who were shot dead in 1970. In the 1980s, he presided over a high profile case involving Cleveland autoworker John Demjanjuk, who was deported amid charges that he committed war crimes in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe. During his decades as a jurist, Battisti was honored by various professional and civic organizations, but he was also a target of criticism.

Battisti was born to Italian immigrant parents Eugene and Jennie (Dalesandro) Battisti, on October 4, 1922, in the Hazelton district of Youngstown, Ohio, a steel production center near the Pennsylvania border. After graduating from Youngstown's East High School, Battisti served as an army combat engineer in the United States Army during World War II.

Battisti was nominated by President John F. Kennedy on August 23, 1961, to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, to a new seat authorized by 75 Stat. 80. He is primarily remembered, however, for his historic ruling in Robert Anthony Reed III v. Rhodes, which found that the Board of Education for the City of Cleveland public school system had violated the law by practicing racial segregation. Gloria Battisti died at the age of 84 on January 18, 2010. Battisti's death on October 19, 1994, received coverage in the regional and national media. Faye Kaufman, Battisti's secretary at the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, reported that he died as a result of typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, contracted during a yearly fishing trip in the West. Battisti's legacy was praised by Daniel McMullen, a former director of the Office on School Monitoring and Community Relations, the entity created by the district court to oversee compliance by the Board of Education with the desegregation orders. "Battisti believed and stood for something much larger than the minutiae of constitutional doctrine", McMullen said. "He possessed the intellect to understand the sweep of history". Battisti was interred at Cleveland's Calvary Cemetery.