Adam Murphy

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On Sept. 25, the Illinois Supreme Court announced that it had suspended the law license of Sean Lenckus, a former McLean County assistant public defender, over alleged online threats to kill Black people.[1]

According to related federal criminal charges originally filed in April in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois, Lenckus repeatedly used the N-word, writing that he would "deal with you and your people with the rope like it was back in the day."[2]

He is accused of posting these racist threats over the course of three years in the comments of YouTube videos — videos that featured Black defendants in the criminal justice system. During the last year of that period, he was representing indigent defendants, including Black clients, in that same system. So, what should happen to their convictions?

If the allegations are true, every Black client whom Lenckus represented while he was posting those threats should have their convictions vacated.

Start with first principles. In Strickland v. Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984 called loyalty "perhaps the most basic of counsel's duties."[3]

The idea was not new. More than two centuries ago, in Williams v. Reed, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story — riding circuit — observed that a lawyer must have "no interest, which may betray his judgment, or endanger his fidelity."[4]

Hatred of a client's race is such an interest. A lawyer who harbors that animus toward Black people labors under a conflict of interest when he represents Black clients.

The usual test for bad lawyering was not built for a lawyer with divided loyalties. When a defendant argues his lawyer failed him, courts ordinarily evaluate the claim under Strickland. Strickland asks whether counsel performed deficiently and whether "there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's ... errors," the outcome "would have been different."

Those are the wrong questions here. What matters is not how well the lawyer performed, but whose side he was on.

And even on its own terms, Strickland sets an impossible bar in this context. Racial animus rarely announces itself on the record. It works in silence: the witness who was never interviewed, the suppression motion that was never filed, the plea that was pushed too hard and too fast. Nearly every conviction comes by guilty plea, negotiated in hallways and back offices, where the record is thinnest.[5]

Asking a client to prove what his lawyer's racial animus cost him is asking him to reconstruct a defense he never received.

The better frame resembles structural error. Courts reserve that category for violations that corrupt the framework of a proceeding, where the harm is too hard to measure or the unfairness is certain. A biased judge is structural error.[6] So is the total denial of counsel.[7] So is racial discrimination in selecting grand and petit juries.[8]

Strickland itself presumes prejudice when counsel is burdened by an actual conflict, because the effects of divided loyalty cannot be traced. A lawyer whose personal animus is at war with his client's very existence is conflicted in the purest sense.

There is precedent for this framework to be applied here. In Commonwealth v. Dew, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held in 2023 that a court-appointed lawyer's "vitriolic hatred of and bigotry against persons of the Muslim faith" and "his equal scorn for and racism against Black persons" created an actual conflict of interest, and that his client owed the court no proof the conflict harmed his defense.[9]

The lawyer, Richard Doyle, had filled his public Facebook page with anti-Muslim slurs, celebrations of violence against Muslims and posts mocking Black people. That bigotry spilled into how he treated his client Anthony Dew, whom he ordered not to wear his kufi — a fact that did not show up on any transcript page.

For the Massachusetts court, the question was whether any impartial observer could trust Doyle to serve his client with undivided loyalty. When it answered "no," it vacated Dew's convictions and allowed him to withdraw his guilty plea. The court recognized that a lawyer's own racial animus can create a conflict every bit as disabling as the classic ones, like jointly representing co-defendants with clashing defenses.

Dew's reasoning applies with even greater force here. Where Doyle's posts were disqualifying, Lenckus' are potentially criminal: race-based death threats serious enough to bring federal charges. No impartial observer could believe that a lawyer accused of repeatedly threatening to kill Black people would fight wholeheartedly for a Black client's freedom. And Lenckus' alleged threats came in response to videos of Black people facing criminal charges, which is the very position his own clients occupied.

His former clients should not have to prove Strickland prejudice — only that there was a conflict. And on these facts, that showing should be straightforward.

But prosecutors need not wait for the courts. The McLean County State's Attorney's Office should identify every Black client Lenckus represented while he was posting those threats, notify them and move to vacate their convictions.

That is not a windfall. Vacating a conviction does not erase the charges. It returns the case to a pretrial posture and puts each person where they would have stood had Lenckus never been appointed: facing the state's accusations with a lawyer whose loyalty is not in doubt.

And where Lenckus' former clients file first, prosecutors should join their motions, or at the very least not oppose them. There is precedent for that, too: In 2020's Ellis v. Harrison before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a California case involving a lawyer with similarly extreme racial animus, the state conceded that habeas relief was warranted.[10]

That concession reflects a broader principle. Racial bias harms more than the defendant. As the Supreme Court reaffirmed in its 2017 decision in Buck v. Davis, it also "'poisons public confidence' in the judicial process."

A prosecutor's interest should be in convictions the public can trust. The convictions of Lenckus' Black clients are not among them.

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Adam Murphy is a clinical associate professor of law and director of the Federal Habeas Clinic at Fordham University School of Law.

Disclosure: Murphy filed and argued an amicus brief in Commonwealth v. Dew on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

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The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

[1] https://www.isba.org/barnews/2026/09/illinoissupremecourtdisbars2suspends8inlatestdisci.

[2] Case No. 1:26-cr-10019.

[3] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/466/668/.

[4] Williams v. Reed , 29 F. Cas. 1386, 1390 (C.C.D. Me. 1824).

[5] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-criminal-cases-justice.

[6] Tumey v. Ohio , 273 U.S. 510 (1927).

[7] United States v. Cronic , 466 U.S. 648 (1984).

[8] Vasquez v. Hillery , 474 U.S. 254 (1986); Batson v. Kentucky , 476 U.S. 79 (1986).

[9] https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/2023/sjc-13356.html.

[10] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/16-56188/16-56188-2020-01-15.html.