DOYLE FOR THE DEFENSE : A lawyer with Catholic convictions - Kevin Doyle

Commonweal, August 13, 1999 by Maurice Timothy Reidy

Kevin Doyle is not a man who has gone unnoticed. As New York State's capital defender since 1995, Doyle holds a high-profile job ensuring that those who face, or may possibly face, New York's recently reinstituted death penalty are competently and vigorously defended. Doyle has been publicly cast as someone with unflagging determination and thick skin, a man willing to go to the mat again and again for clients whom prosecutors and much of the public think deserve the electric chair. In fact, this month Doyle will be helping to appeal the case of Robert Shulman, a convicted serial killer, sentenced to die on August 30. Less noted, however, are the Roman Catholic roots of Doyle's passion for leaping to the defense of unpopular causes, a passion that extends far beyond the courtroom.

That passion and its roots have been frequently displayed in the correspondence columns of a long list of newspapers and magazines, including this one. Indeed, long before his days as a public official, Doyle made his debut in the New York Times letters columns with a sharp plea for fair play in the abortion debate. "Serious and honest discussion is in short supply," wrote the twenty-four-year-old law student in 1980, objecting that an op-ed piece had offered "a bizarre treatment of the issue," framing it, the young Doyle claimed, in terms of "the survival of a patriarchal family structure" while failing "to deal at all with abortion opponents' most cogent contention: the seeming personhood of the fetus." Doyle was not inhibited by the fact that the op-ed piece was written by one of his former Fordham University teachers.

Seventeen years later, he responded to a front-page New York Times story about Irish New Yorkers thin on faith and thick on blarney. "I do not begrudge the right of faith-impaired Irish-Americans to bask in the Celtic heritage purged of religious elements," Doyle began. Still, he parried, "could Irish victories in labor organizing have taken place without the Roman Catholic church's support? Locate the Irish faces in photographs of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights marches. How many are not over Roman collars or under veils?"

Doyle has written so many letters defending Pius XII against accusations that the pontiff was indifferent to the Holocaust that the New York lawyer has wondered out loud whether he should bill the Pacelli family. ("Letters to the editor are a particularly good medium for me because I don't have time to do long articles," Doyle says.)

But correspondence columns are not the only place to get an earful of Doyle's opinions or encounter his dogged sense of mission. In 1995, the forty-three-year-old Doyle was named one of the top hundred Irish- Americans by Irish America magazine. During his acceptance speech at a fashionable Manhattan restaurant, he returned the favor by challenging his audience of well-to-do Irish-Americans to see their poor, immigrant forebears in the faces of the minorities who will inevitably line death row. Speaking at a Democratic Socialists Scholars conference last spring, the former altar boy did not endear himself to the liberal-left audience by linking his stand against the death penalty to his opposition to abortion.

Clearly, endearing himself does not rank number one on Kevin Doyle's list of ambitions. His everyday rhetoric and intellectual temperament are steeped in the adversarial culture of the courtroom. And rooting for the underdog-whether it be an unborn child, a much-maligned pope, or a teen-ager on death row-seems second nature to him. But really to understand Doyle you must appreciate the extent to which his personality and moral stamina have been fueled by what he unabashedly calls "Holy Mother Church."

Doyle's corner office, located in the New York City branch of the Capital Defender Office at 21st Street and Broadway, is a virtual roadmap to his life. Photographs of Fordham and Martin Luther King, Jr., hang on his office walls, as do nineteenth-century anti-Catholic cartoons by Thomas Nast and a poster from the Birmingham, Alabama, Opera Company. Pinned to a bulletin board next to his computer are snapshots of his three children and office memos listing the latest number of "death notices pending."

Doyle talked to me there on a recent afternoon, his feet resting on a computer desk. He responds to a question by furrowing his brow in characteristic fashion and admonishing his Catholic brethren in a spirit reminiscent of his letters to the Times: "There are so many Catholics who have by and large experienced the institutional church in a favorable way, but who don't speak up," he says. As for those "who think that they are proving themselves feminists, or champions of racial equality, or champions of tolerance by berating the church for having been sexist, for having persecuted heretics, for having been racist," Doyle declares, "that's pretty cheap contrition."

In moments of self-reflection, Doyle admits his own fallibility. If you had asked him about Pius XII when he was in college, Doyle would have told you that "the poor Jews were being killed and this terrible guy turned his back on them." Subsequently his own research has convinced him that Pius's situation was far more complicated. When it comes to abortion law, Doyle's strict prolife thinking has also evolved. A 1988 letter he wrote to the Times argued that the abortifacient RU-486 might be a way to bridge the gap between prolife and prochoice partisans. And he dissents from the Vatican on other things, arguing, for example, that the sacrament of holy orders should be open to women.