DOYLE FOR THE DEFENSE

...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...

...Despite such admonitions, the Fordham graduate wasn't afraid to rely on his own vision of Christianity to challenge both judge and jury in defending against the death penalty...

...An indispensable part of Doyle's preparation for his present post took place in Alabama, a state notable for its eagerness to impose capital justice...

...Sitting in his Manhattan office on a recent afternoon, Doyle reminds one, to use an older Catholic trope, of a lonely soldier of the church (an appropriate metaphor since he once seriously considered becoming a Jesuit...

...Whether one first meets him in person or in print, his aggressive (if not combative) nature, acute mind, and relentless pursuit of the truth are immediately obvious...

...He is a wily and stubborn defender of the defenseless who—maybe to blow off a little steam—brings the same instinct for the jugular to his participation in the more decorous world of civic life...

...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...

...Clearly, endearing himself does not rank number one on Kevin Doyle's list of ambitions...

...The issue came to the fore in 1994...

...In addition to what Kelly calls Doyle's "razor-sharp mind," Doyle had a sharp tongue...

...In moments of self-reflection, Doyle admits his own fallibility...

...Conor's middle name is Nicolini (which Doyle will playfully rhyme with jelly-beany), named after the Italian bishop who helped to protect Jews during World War II...

...His father, John, was a police officer in the 48th Precinct in the Tremont section of the Bronx...

...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...

...He sees his work as an extension of civil rights—a cause planted in him as a child and nourished by his love for Martin Luther King, Jr...

...It amazes me that we're trying to have a republic here, considering how little homework the citizens do," Doyle says...

...Doyle is quick to remind visitors that the Capital Defender Office is made up of a team of people, not just one person...

...I don't know of another state in the country that has adopted the death penalty and then four years later—certainly in a state this size—had only a handful of people on the 'row,'" says George H. Kendall of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund...

...For his two older brothers, Jack and Brian, Catholic teaching became the basis for opposing the war in Vietnam, while Doyle's younger brother Kieran worked at Legal Aid before entering law school...

...Volker would ultimately sponsor seventeen such bills over the next seventeen years—all of them vetoed by Governors Hugh L. Carey and Mario M. Cuomo, both Democrats...

...Despite the financial rewards, he knew from day one that his stay on Wall Street would be temporary...

...Doyle briefly interned at Commonweal in 1978—a place where contentious debate seemed like "hog heaven" to the future lawyer...

...At the time, the teen-age Doyle believed that the Democratic party was the "best vehicle for achieving Catholic social justice...

...In one instance, an eyewitness to a murder berated him for representing the accused: "Mr...

...I think it takes some time for people to find their voice," says Charles Kelly, Doyle's college roommate...

...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...

...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...

...Kevin Doyle is a package deal...

...The bulk of his time is committed to his work and his family...

...From an early age, the Doyles tried to imbue their children with a sense of social justice and of the connection between religion and political life...

...Aiden's birth announcement read, "That's right...

...Jim Dwyer, Pulitzer Prize columnist for the New York Daily News and one of Doyle's closest friends, recalls his first impressions of Doyle: "He was no shrinking violet, even with a stranger...

...I think a lot of my friends were deeply offended by Murphy's talk, but fortunately we had Kevin," Schroth recalls...

...In 1995, the forty-three-year-old Doyle was named one of the top hundred Irish-Americans by Irish America magazine...

...A s head of the Capital Defender Office, Doyle supervises a team of twenty lawyers on the state payroll...

...The Doyles were initiated into the liturgical reforms of Vatican II at the Fordham University chapel...

...He's got one of those bulldog minds," says Schroth...

...He didn't alienate us...

...The parents attended CFM meetings at their Bronx parish, Our Lady of Mercy...

...The desperate need for qualified capital defenders kept them there much longer...

...The social-justice message took hold in a big way among the young Doyles...

...He was always identified as an Irish Catholic, so I decided that whatever he said I was going to disagree with, which I did...

...He and Mary and their children—Nora (10), Aiden (8), and Conor (6)—live in a modest home in South Nyack, New York...

...I was very annoyed because he called my position 'bizarre,' which is putting down rather than confronting my argument...

...he actually drew us into the debate, whatever it happened to be," remembers Kelly, "everything from the Kennedys, to McCarthy-era matters, to European intellectual history...

...whether he should bill the Pacelli family...

...After law school at the University of Virginia, Doyle returned to New York and worked for Legal Aid—the single largest provider of legal counsel for those in need...

...In total, capital punishment is now legal in thirty-eight states...

...There are currently three people on death row in New York State, ten pending or active cases in which a district attorney is seeking the death penalty, and fifty-six cases in which prosecutors have yet to make a decision...

...To meet that goal, Doyle accepted a position at the Wall Street law firm of Lord Day & Lord, Barrett Smith...

...Raymond Schroth, S.J...

...But you don't have to know Doyle well before you begin to understand why he is so cherished by his friends and family...

...In a day when debate over moral issues often begins and ends with a "whatever," Doyle has thought seriously and scrupulously about what it means to adhere to a set of religiously based principles...

...They married in 1982...

...The desire to levy the death penalty is particularly strong in the South, a section of the country that is responsible for 442 of the 552 people executed in this country since 1976...

...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...

...Doyle himself has his hand in much of what goes on in the Capital Defender Offices in Albany, Rochester, and Manhattan...

...As a boy growing up in the Bronx, Doyle would argue over civil rights with other children...

...Watkins had been convicted of killing a police officer and a butcher...

...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...

...Seventeen years later, he responded to a front-page New York Times story about Irish New Yorkers thin on faith and thick on blarney...

...When my family lived on West 193rd Street, Fordham struck this kid as a very progressive and promising place," Doyle would eventually write in the university's undergraduate magazine Point...

...Doyle, eager to help create a strong and effective office, accepted...

...As limited as my parents may have been in their social contacts and their cultural awareness," Doyle recalls, "they fundamentally understood that Catholicism was completely incompatible with segregation...

...I was certainly not left with the impression that you could serve social justice by writing books...

...Later, after his family moved across the Hudson to Rockland County, he campaigned for George Mc-Govern while attending Bergen Catholic High School...

...I've been visited by an occasional nightmare about letters to the editor which begin with my name taken in vain and go downhill from there...

...Despite his hectic seven-day work week and trips to the Capital Defender Offices in upstate New York, Doyle has not been wholly defined by his job...

...It was at Virginia that Doyle met Mary Sullivan, a graduate nursing student...

...That's the way he is on Pius XII...

...Stubborn" is another way of describing Doyle...

...Fordham was just down the block and things seemed to be happening there...

...Kevin Martin Doyle was born in 1956, the fourth of six children...

...We're skipping the Luther since we're papist and loyal...

...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...

...While at Lord Day, Doyle did pro bono work for Daryl Watkins, a death-row prisoner in Alabama...

...Williams is serving a sentence of life without parole...

...As principal administrator, he helps manage personnel, talks with the media, and meets with representatives from the private bar who often serve as counsel in capital cases...

...Does he make some people uncomfortable...

...Doyle maintains, however, that his interest in Pius XII and other controversies remain occasional avocations...

...Helen, his mother, cared for the children at home...

...And he dissents from the Vatican on other things, arguing, for example, that the sacrament of holy orders should be open to women...

...Although the Capital Defender Office takes no official stand on the death penalty, those opposed to capital punishment have praised its work...

...You bet...

...My son is named after Martin Luther King, and I really don't like that word...

...After that decision was reversed by the Court in 1976, State Senator Dale M. Volker of Erie County sponsored a bill to bring the death penalty back to New York State...

...But correspondence columns are not the only place to get an earful of Doyle's opinions or encounter his dogged sense of mission...

...The boatsman then went on to point out other sites on the shoreline...

...When Kevin Doyle and Mary Sullivan arrived in Birmingham, they planned to stay two years...

...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...

...Only in June 1995 did the family return to New York, a decision based on the knowledge that they weren't going to live in Alabama forever and an eagerness for a permanent home for their three children...

...For Doyle, working on capital cases was the ultimate realization of his callings as a lawyer and as a Catholic...

...To watch Doyle is to see and hear James Cagney cast as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons...

...I do not begrudge the right of faith-impaired Irish-Americans to bask in the Celtic heritage purged of religious elements," Doyle began...

...His slight New York accent and colorful language betray a childhood spent in the Fordham section of the Bronx...

...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...

...And his principles are entirely rooted in Catholic theology...

...Doyle's work often set him apart in Alabama, a state where political and religious justifications for the death penalty are deeply entrenched...

...I have no shame insisting that the church be treated fairly in a controversy like this, and it's been treated anything but...

...I don't know anybody in public life or in private life who takes his principles and lives them as closely as Kevin does," says Dwyer...

...Still, New York State, the first state to use the electric chair, holds its own infamous records: In particular, according to Doyle, it has wrongfully executed more people than any other state...

...The research and writing of these profiles are supported by a grant from the Lilly Endowment...

...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 Maurice Timothy Reidy is a student at the School of Journalism at Columbia University and an editorial assistant at Commonweal...

...When a suspect is brought up on a murder charge, Doyle's office is immediately notified...

...Doyle would later feel compelled to abandon the Democratic party because of its unyielding prochoice platform...

...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...

...Doyle advises on each case that his office oversees...

...Second, this task allowed him to defend human life and thereby enlarge his prolife position on abortion...

...Although Doyle admits that Pius XII was not a hero during the Holocaust, he feels that Pius has been unjustly cast as the bad guy...

...For a novice journalist like myself, interviewing such a publicly querulous individual was an intimidating task...

...African exchange students from nearby Fordham University were often invited for dinner—giving the Doyle clan a chance to encounter people of different races and cultures...

...Letters to the editor are a particularly good medium for me because I don't have time to do long articles," Doyle says...

...If and when a suspect is convicted of murder and sentenced to death, the Capital Defender Office will appeal, or help to appeal, the case...

...Doyle's letter writing reveals a willingness to take a stand, no matter how unpopular the issue...

...There are currently 178 persons on Alabama's death row...

...After an initial search, Arthur Liman, chairman of the board established to create the Capital Defender Office, offered Doyle the job as acting Capital Defender in July 1995...

...You had to be engaged in the world, doing practical things, and changing things...

...When Thomas A. Murphy, the General Motors chairman, spoke at the university's 1977 commencement, Doyle questioned the captain of industry for attempting to minimize the differences between Catholicism and capitalism...

...Doyle, tonight you will be in my prayers...

...Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights marches...

...Still more incredible is that Murphy-types not only fail to perceive intrafaith conflicts, but actually regard their creeds as mutually reinforcing...

...Kevin's two sisters, Mary and Deirdre, both worked for a time in medical care...

...In 1988, after six years with Legal Aid, says Doyle, "my wife and I realized that neither of us had been clever enough to marry into money and we needed a down payment for a new home...

...Exhibit A: His ardent defense of Pius XII and the pope's role in the Holocaust...

...Still, he parried, "could Irish victories in labor organizing have taken place without the Roman Catholic church's support...

...It always amazes me," Doyle wrote in Point, "that Catholics like Murphy can convince themselves that they have had the extraordinary luck of being born into the two true faiths: Roman Catholicism and American capitalism...

...He admits to feeling more in common with a Baptist colleague, who believes in the existence of absolute truth, than he does with most of his fellow Catholics...

...Doyle talked to me there on a recent afternoon, his feet resting on a computer desk...

...Less than a month later, Doyle began work as New York's acting capital defender...

...If you are at all sympathetic to the causes Doyle champions, the temptation arises to try to persuade him to tone down his rhetoric—to adapt himself to those in the public and the press who are suspicious of outspoken Catholics...

...But he does not do as much courtroom work now as he once did defending death-row prisoners in Alabama...

...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...

...However, unlike most states with the death penalty, New York established a well-financed Capital Defender Office to represent individuals charged with capital crimes...

...His everyday rhetoric and intellectual temperament are steeped in the adversarial culture of the courtroom...

...As of summer 1999, only thirty-six murder defendants (about 1 percent) have faced possible execution and no one has been executed...

...Third, it gave the preacher in him the chance to teach the Catholic understanding of human fallibility and forgiveness...

...Doyle employed these traits when writing for Point magazine, a student opinion publication modeled on periodicals like Commonweal...

...Commonweal 14 August 13,1999 Bernice Rosenthal, the Fordham professor whose Times op-ed piece on abortion provoked Doyle's rejoinder, reflects the views of many who have tangled polemically with him over the years...

...He has sandy blond hair, deep blue eyes, and a strong chin...

...But then I realize that the opportunity to work with people to create an office where constitutional safeguards really mean something in the capital context...is unique...

...The Doyles' outlook was partially rooted in the Christian Family Movement (CFM), a parish-based organization dedicated to developing a consciousness, both at home and in the world, based on Christian principles and examples...

...As his letters indicate, citizenship is important to him, and the glibness of much political and religious commentary is a source of annoyance...

...an associate editor at Commonweal from 1973 to 1979), who taught Doyle and advised Point, was proud of his pupil...

...I was furious," she says...

...Locate the Irish faces in photographs of the Reverend Dr...

...As a Fordham undergraduate, he once described his political affiliation as "Pacem in terns-Jeffersonian Democrat—belief in human rights for individuals in both political and economic realms though avoiding any dogmatisms...

...How many are not over Roman collars or under veils...

...In the wake of Cuomo's defeat, the bill was passed by the legislature and signed by the newly elected governor...

...A few months later, after a more exhaustive search, Doyle was officially named the first capital defender in New York history...

...Those who in 1995 advocated reintroducing capital punishment in New York State predicted that prosecutors would seek the death penalty in 15 to 20 percent of such cases...

...During the ride, the boatsman pointed out a shore town and said, "That's where the niggers live...

...When given the chance to work full-time defending death-row prisoners for the nonprofit Alabama Capital Representation Center, Doyle accepted and moved his family to Birmingham in 1990...

...And like a pit bull, Doyle is ready to pounce at any moment...

...Doyle would later comment that "defending the powerful is like praying for the soul of Mother Teresa...

...While Doyle handled cases in Brooklyn and the Bronx, his wife, Mary Sullivan, worked as a nurse in the pediatric unit at Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital in Manhattan...

...And that can be more than a little bit daunting...

...For Commonweal 13 August 13,1999 one, he believes that the death penalty is racist because more members of minority groups are on death row than whites...

...I think he enjoyed that...

...Sullivan's recollections shed a little more light on the situation: "When I first met Kevin, I was sort of going through an anti-Irish, anti-Catholic phase...

...It is a tremendous privilege to recruit and collaborate and learn from the lawyers who are here...

...I'm not sure if this was a good part of the sixties ethos or not," Doyle recalls, "but there was a very anti-ivory tower point of view...

...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...

...Running against the outspoken death-penalty opponent Cuomo, Republican gubernatorial candidate George Pataki promised that if elected he would sign a death-penalty bill...

...Thanks in part to Doyle's efforts, Watkins is now serving a life sentence without parole...

...That passion and its roots have been frequently displayed in the correspondence columns of a long list of newspapers and magazines, including this one...

...A 1988 letter he wrote to the Times argued that the abortifa-dent RU-486 might be a way to bridge the gap between pro-life and prochoice partisans...

...It's Aiden Martin King Doyle...

...All the Doyle friends I spoke with recalled a typical "Doyle-wn" story...

...For him, law school was a place to indulge his passion for "ascertaining truth through argument" while working out on a practical level his commitment to Catholic social justice...

...his knowledge of church doctrine and history expose a quick mind and a Jesuit education...

...But Commonweal I I August 13,1999 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...

...If the suspect already has a lawyer, Doyle and his colleagues will serve as consultants, helping the suspect's lawyer whenever necessary...

...When it comes to abortion law, Doyle's strict prolife thinking has also evolved...

...Sullivan works part-time as a nurse practitioner...

...Today, Jack runs New Settlement Housing in the Bronx and Brian works upstate in Poughkeepsie with the developmentally disabled...

...I get a little bit itchy that I'm not doing more courtroom Commonweal I 1 August 13,1999 work," he reports...

...Yes, tonight I will ask the Lord to punish you for what you are doing...

...It's like a pit bull gets on your leg and you can't get it off...

...What then to make of Kevin Doyle...

...In many ways, Doyle's appointment can be seen as the fruition of his parents' active involvement in the church...

...Commonweal I 5 August 13,1999...

...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 fairing "to deal at all with abortion opponents' most cogent contention: the seeming personhood of the fetus...

...About a minute later, Kevin said to him, "I was named for a black saint, Martin de Porres...

...Each of the children attends Catholic school...

...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...

...Doyle was not inhibited by the fact that the op-ed piece was written by one of his former Fordham University teachers...

...It was probably the best thing I could have done to keep Kevin interested in me...

...In one instance, he recommended buying a client The Autobiography of Malcolm X to help him see that there is a potential for a life of the mind in prison...

...If the suspect requires representation, the Capital Defender Office will provide a lawyer trained in capital law...

...Jim Dwyer came up with this one: One summer in Alabama, Dwyer and Doyle hired a local fisherman to take them out on the Gulf of Mexico...

...That record was set, of course, before 1972, when the Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia declared death-penalty laws of that time unconstitutional...

...We disliked each other intensely for a year," Doyle recalls with a laugh, "and then we started dating...

...Friends and colleagues hint that with Doyle's commitment to civic life and dedication to the poor, he could seek public office someday, but Doyle knows that his moral views preclude much of a political future...

...And you sense that Kevin Doyle wouldn't want it, and perhaps couldn't even do it, any other way...

...Doyle maintains that he did confront her argument and that only space restrictions prevented him from acknowledging the nuances of her position...

...He had decided on trial work while working for the general counsel at the NAACP during his summers at law school...

...His research on this issue illustrates his own commitment to homework: He has pored over old issues of the New York Times and other publications on microfilm and read virtually every English-language book on the church and the Holocaust...

...He had more to offer than a lot of other talented people that had applied," says Kendall of the NAACP, who was consulted during the hiring process and noted that Doyle had practiced in New York both in a big firm and in the public defender's office, and had also tried capital cases in Alabama...

...Subsequently his own research has convinced him that Pius's situation was far more complicated...

...But finally it's impossible to separate Doyle's passion from his reasoned conviction, his eagerness to engage an adversary from his dedication to those in desperate need of his help...

...Indeed, three years into their new statute, despite a corps of well-trained capital defenders, New Jersey had seventeen people on death row, while Pennsylvania had seven...

...His sharply worded letters have rustled a few feathers...

...Kevin found it quicker than the rest of us...

...Doyle also finds time to tend a vegetable garden, go grocery shopping for his mother (his father died when he was in law school), and kayak alone on the Hudson River...

...The concentration-camp number tattooed on the forearm of their Jewish landlord also made a lasting impression: "I don't want to overstate this," Doyle says carefully, "but you would have thought the guy had taken out the Host from under his coat in the sense of the awe that my parents were in...

...Doyle began law school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1979...

...But despite his talent for caustic remarks, Doyle wasn't one to flaunt his intellect...

...In his final summation to the jury before the sentencing of Willie Williams, a man who had pled guilty to killing his girlfriend, Doyle ended with these words: "Please, follow the law by the light of your faith and do what Jesus would do...

...This profile is the first of several that will examine the lives of men and women who in their work or art struggle with the fundamental tensions of religious belief and practice in modern society...