Court tosses conviction of Black, Muslim man whose lawyer was a racist Islamophobe

A Dorchester man who followed his lawyer's advice to plead guilty to being a pimp will get a chance to prove his innocence at trial after the Supreme Judicial Court ruled today he couldn't possibly have gotten good representation from his lawyer - who professed repeatedly and publicly online to hating Blacks as much as he hated Muslims.

Anthony Dew was indicted in 2015 on five counts of trafficking a person for sexual servitude and one count each of rape and possession of a class A drug. A judge appointed him Richard Doyle as his lawyer. In June, 2016, at Doyle's recommendation, Dew pleaded guilty to the five human-trafficking charges in exchange for having the rape charge dropped. He was sentenced to eight to ten years in state prison, followed by seven years of probation.

What Dew didn't know, the state's highest court wrote in its summary of the case, was that Doyle seethed with hatred for Blacks and Muslims - to the point of expressing his loathing on his Facebook page, at least starting in 2014 and continuing through 2017.

[T]he defendant was appointed counsel who openly posted, on his social media account, his vitriolic hatred of and bigotry against persons of the Muslim faith; his unabashed anti-Muslim rants were matched only by his equal scorn for and racism against Black persons. Some of these postings occurred while counsel was representing the defendant. Indeed, counsel's intolerance and prejudice seeped into his representation of the defendant. At least twice, counsel chastised the defendant for wearing religious garb, demanding that the defendant not wear "that shit" again; once, he refused to speak to the defendant because the defendant was wearing a kufi prayer cap in contravention of counsel's directive. At their final meeting, counsel advised the defendant to accept a plea deal, which the defendant did. Several years later, counsel's bigotry came to the attention of the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS), which suspended him for no less than one year as a result. ...

We conclude that the conflict of interest inherent in counsel's bigotry against persons of the defendant's faith and race, which manifested during counsel's representation of the defendant, deprived the defendant of his right to effective assistance of counsel -- a right upon which our entire system of criminal justice depends to ensure a "fair trial."

Doyle represented roughly 6,700 indigent clients for the Committee for Public Counsel Services over his career before CPCS learned of his posts and took him off cases.

These posts - some of which he put up while in Massachusetts courthouses - shared such things as a photo of pig testicles with the caption: "Dear muslims, kiss our big bacon balls," called Colin Kaepernick "boy," and referred to Black defendants in Suffolk Superior Court as "assorted thugs and bad guys." One post he shared had two photos, "one depicting Black men posing with guns captioned, 'Don't glorify shooting people,' and the other showing distraught Black men captioned, 'Then cry like a bitch when someone you love gets shot.' " He also expressed his desire to round up what he considered illegal immigrants and "give 'em the Jimmy Hoffa treatment."

According to the court, Dew did not learn of any of this until 2021. He filed - shortly after Doyle died - to vacate his convictions, but a Suffolk Superior Court judge denied the request, saying there was no proof that Doyle didn't provide adequate representation in court just because he was a virulent bigot, that plenty of lawyers provide fair representation to people they can't stand.

The SJC, however, disagreed, ruling that Doyle had too fundamental a conflict of interest to provide the sort of "zealous" advocacy criminal defendants are supposed to get.

Doyle's animus against persons of the Muslim faith and his racism against Black persons, demonstrated by his social media posts (some of which were made at the court house while he was serving clients in his professional capacity), and manifest in his treatment of the defendant -- a Black, Muslim man -- during the representation, presented an actual conflict of interest in this case. ...

Doyle's social media postings "exhibited an intensity of bias that cannot be squared with []neutral decision making," Ellis v. Harrison, 947 F.3d 555, 563 (9th Cir. 2020) (Nguyen, J., concurring), as his other overt acts during the representation confirm. The defendant has shown that Doyle's biases infected his representation of the defendant. The record developed by the defendant shows more than a few stray social media postings, or comments made in the wake of highly charged emotional or shocking events, untethered to Doyle's conduct during the defendant's representation. See id. ("I do not suggest that every attorney who utters a racial epithet will be unable to adequately defend clients of a different race"). Instead, the defendant has shown a pattern of posts reflecting the intensity of Doyle's bias, coupled with a record that Doyle was unable to divorce his animus from his conduct as the defendant's counsel. ...

Where, as the record shows was the case here, counsel harbors a deep-seated animus for persons of the defendant's race or religion, we cannot presume zealous advocacy; nor can we ask the defendant to prove how his counsel's bigotry might have affected the plea deal or otherwise impaired the representation, especially in view of the record that Doyle's bias reared its head in connection with his treatment of the defendant.