A criminal defendant’s right to “effective assistance of counsel” is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article 12 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.
This right is potentially violated when a defendant’s lawyer has a conflict of interest.
According to Massachusetts case law, conflicts occur when a lawyer has a
competing interest or responsibility that will materially interfere with lawyer’s independent professional judgment in considering alternatives or foreclose courses of action that reasonably should be pursued on behalf of client
Based on this, a criminal defendant, who is black and Muslim, successfully claimed that his trial lawyer was ineffective due to the lawyer’s racists comments made on Facebook. Court documents state that the lawyer’s comments harbored “animus against persons of the Muslim faith” and “racism against Black persons.”
In an opinion published yesterday, the Appeals Court ruled that such comments did in fact create a conflict of interest for the lawyer and his client:
this case presents the question…whether plea counsel’s Facebook posts alone rendered him categorically unable to represent any defendant belonging to one of the groups referenced in his posts…we conclude that they do.
The full text of the opinion is attached below.