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.

[2] Upon his return from Europe, he received an Artium Baccalaureus degree in 1947 from Ohio University and a Juris Doctor in 1950 from Harvard Law School.

Some of his rulings generated heated debate, including his acquittal of eight former Ohio National Guardsmen implicated in the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.

[6] 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.

While Battisti was lauded by supporters for what they termed as his courage and fortitude, he faced criticism from the Cleveland Board of Education and segments of the larger community.

[4] His landmark ruling in the Cleveland desegregation case later prompted fellow Youngstown native Judge Nathaniel R. Jones, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, to characterize Battisti as "an unlikely hero" of the civil rights movement.

[6] "The nine had set up a system in which the majority decided court policy in May 1985", an obituary reported, "but Battisti conceded that he ignored it on the ground that 'the chief judge must make the decisions'".

[3] Gloria Battisti later recalled that, in the aftermath of the Cleveland decision, the couple received death threats and required the protection of the United States Marshal Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In 1972, he was elected president of the United States Sixth District Judges Association;[2] and the following year, he received an honorary doctor of law degree from St. Francis College, in Loretto, Pennsylvania.

[2] In 1979, United States Representative John Ashbrook (R-OH), who opposed the desegregation plan for the Cleveland Public Schools District, introduced a resolution to the House Judiciary Committee seeking to have Battisti impeached.

[6] 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.