Brandon Mayfield was mistakenly linked to the Madrid bombings.
photo: Don Ryan/AP
UPDATE:
Oregon Judge Knocks Down Part of Patriot Act
Reuters 26sep2007
[Background articles below]
|
Brandon Mayfield was mistakenly linked to the Madrid bombings. photo: Don Ryan/AP |
WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 — The federal government agreed to pay $2 million Wednesday to an Oregon lawyer wrongly jailed in connection with the 2004 terrorist bombings in Madrid, and it issued a formal apology to him and his family.
The unusual settlement caps a two-and-a-half-year ordeal that saw the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, go from being a suspected terrorist operative to a symbol, in the eyes of his supporters, of government overzealousness in the war on terrorism.
“The United States of America apologizes to Mr. Brandon Mayfield and his family for the suffering caused” by his mistaken arrest, the government’s apology began. It added that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which erroneously linked him to the Madrid bombs through a fingerprinting mistake, had taken steps “to ensure that what happened to Mr. Mayfield and the Mayfield family does not happen again.”
At an emotional news conference in Portland announcing the settlement, Mr. Mayfield said he and his wife, an Egyptian immigrant, and their three children still suffered from the scars left by the government’s surveillance of him and his jailing for two weeks in May 2004.
“The horrific pain, torture and humiliation that this has caused myself and my family is hard to put into words,” said Mr. Mayfield, an American-born convert to Islam and a former lieutenant in the Army.
“The days, weeks and months following my arrest,” he said, “were some of the darkest we have had to endure. I personally was subject to lockdown, strip searches, sleep deprivation, unsanitary living conditions, shackles and chains, threats, physical pain and humiliation.”
Fingerprint examiners at the F.B.I. erroneously linked Mr. Mayfield to the terrorist bombings in Madrid through a mistaken identification of a print taken from a plastic bag containing detonator caps that was found at the scene of the bombings. The bombings, on March 11, 2004, killed 191 people and left 2,000 injured in the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe since World War II.
Despite doubts from Spanish officials about the validity of the fingerprint match, American officials began an aggressive high-level investigation into Mr. Mayfield in the weeks after the bombings. The fact that he had represented a terrorism defendant in a child-custody case in Portland spurred further interest in him. Using expanded surveillance powers under the USA Patriot Act, the government wiretapped his conversations, conducted secret searches of his home and his law office and jailed him for two weeks as a material witness in the case before a judge threw out the case against him.
The settlement includes an unusual condition that frees the government from future liability except in one important area: Mr. Mayfield is allowed to continue a lawsuit seeking to overturn parts of the Patriot Act as a violation of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
Several legal experts said they considered the settlement significant because of the public apology and the substantial payment.
“You almost never see something like this,” said Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, a legal clinic in New York City. “It’s extraordinary, but the harm caused him was extraordinary. What I really think it speaks to is just how clearly the U.S. government crossed the line when it went after Mayfield.”
Suzanne Spaulding, a former lawyer with the Central Intelligence Agency who specializes in national security law, said that the terms of the settlement allowing Mr. Mayfield to continue his lawsuit over the Patriot Act were also significant.
“You’ve got to think that the Justice Department did not want to make that concession,” she said. “That and the two million dollars are further evidence that they were vulnerable and that he clearly had some significant leverage in these negotiations.”
Justice Department officials said they were confident that the legal foundation of the Patriot Act, including the surveillance and search provisions challenged by Mr. Mayfield, would hold up in court.
Although the F.B.I. has acknowledged serious missteps in the case, an investigation by the Justice Department inspector general released this year concluded that the government did not misuse its expanded counterterrorism powers under the Patriot Act and that Mr. Mayfield’s Muslim faith was not the reason he was initially investigated. Still, Mr. Mayfield continued to assert Wednesday that he and his family were a target “because of our Muslim religion.”
“Our freedom of religion in this country is a sacred right,” he said, “and the exercise of one’s beliefs in a lawful manner should never be a factor in a government’s investigation of any citizen.”
In Washington, the settlement was applauded by Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who is expected to become the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in January.
“The Mayfield case cries out for checks and balances on what has been, at times, an overzealous pursuit of innocent Americans,” Mr. Conyers said. “I am heartened that Mr. Mayfield has received this small measure of justice.”
Brian Libby contributed reporting from Portland, Ore.
source: 30nov2006
Background —
PORTLAND, OR - Offering a rare public apology, the FBI admitted mistakenly linking an American lawyer’s fingerprint to one found near the scene of a terrorist bombing in Spain, a blunder that led to his imprisonment for two weeks.
The apology Monday came hours after a judge dismissed the case against Brandon Mayfield, who had been held as a material witness in the Madrid bombings case, which killed 191 people and injured about 2,000 others.
Mayfield, a 37-year-old convert to Islam, sharply criticized the government, calling his time behind bars “humiliating” and “embarrassing” and saying he was targeted because of his faith.
“This whole process has been a harrowing ordeal. It shouldn’t happen to anybody,” said Mayfield. “I believe I was singled out and discriminated against, I feel, as a Muslim.”
Karin Immergut, the U.S. attorney in Oregon, denied Mayfield had been a target because of his religion and maintained that the FBI had followed all laws in the case.
Court documents released Monday suggested that the mistaken arrest first sprang from an error by the FBI’s supercomputer for matching fingerprints and then was compounded by the FBI’s own analysts.
FBI promises to review practices “The FBI apologizes to Mr. Mayfield and his family for the hardships that this matter has caused,” the bureau said in a statement. The agency also said it would review its practices on fingerprint analyses.
“We need to know more about how this happened. All of us in this country need to know more about how this type of mistake can be made,” said U.S. Public Defender Steve Wax, Mayfield’s attorney.
Mayfield, a former Army lieutenant, was released last week. But he was not altogether cleared of suspicion; the government said he remained a material witness and put restrictions on his movements.
Those restrictions were lifted Monday.
U.S. District Judge Robert Jones said all property that had been seized from the Mayfield residence should be returned, and all copies of Mayfield’s personal documents held by the federal government were to be destroyed.
The case began when FBI fingerprint examiners in Quantico, Va., searched for possible matches to a digital image of a fingerprint found on a bag of detonators the day of the Spanish bombings on March 11.
The system returned 15 possible matches, including prints belonging to Mayfield, on file from a 1984 burglary arrest in Wichita, Kan., when Mayfield was a teenager.
Three separate FBI examiners narrowed the identification to Mayfield, according to Robert Jordan, the FBI agent in charge of Oregon. A court-appointed fingerprint expert agreed.
Spain doubted any connection The FBI maintained its certainty even as Spanish authorities said by mid-April that the original image of the fingerprint taken directly from the bag did not match Mayfield’s, Wax said.
Last week, Spanish authorities said the fingerprints of an Algerian man were on the bag. Jordan said FBI examiners flew to Spain, viewed the original print pattern of the fingerprint on paper, and agreed that it was not Mayfield’s.
As additional evidence in support of Mayfield’s arrest, the FBI pointed to Mayfield’s attendance at a local mosque, his advertising legal services in a publication owned by a man suspected to have links to terrorism, and a telephone call his wife placed to a branch of an Islamic charity with suspected terrorist ties.
They also noted that Mayfield represented a man in a child custody case who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to help al-Qaida and the Taliban fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
According to court documents, FBI agents began their surveillance of Mayfield two weeks after the attacks in the Spanish capital. Under a provision of the U.S. Patriot Act, they entered his home without his knowledge — but aroused the family’s suspicion by bolting the wrong lock on their way out and leaving a footprint on the rug that didn’t match any family members.
During a later raid, FBI agents took Mayfield’s computers, modem, safe deposit key, assorted papers, as well as copies of the Quran and what they classified as “Spanish documents” — apparently Spanish homework by one of Mayfield’s sons.
Mayfield, who runs a small Portland law office, was never facing any formal charges. He was arrested as a material witness, and held in the Multnomah County Detention Center on the chance that he might have information about the Spain bombings.
At a press conference, Mayfield talked about his time behind bars, initially in solitary confinement and then in the jail’s mental ward. Mayfield feared for his safety when inmates began to recognize him on the nightly news.
“The climate of fear of terror makes this a cautionary tale about the way in which that fear can ensnare an innocent person in the type of abuse to which Mr. Mayfield was subjected,” Wax said.
More background —
He's been home for more than a week now, back with his wife and kids and grateful to be putting his life back together. But Brandon Mayfield, the Portland, Ore., lawyer who was wrongly jailed for 14 days as a "material witness" in the deadly Madrid bombings, is still mad as hell. Mad at the FBI, for insisting his fingerprint had been found on a plastic bag used by the terrorists—even though Mayfield hadn't traveled abroad in a decade and the Spanish authorities doubted the print match. Madder still at the Justice Department, for using the material-witness law to round him up on flimsy evidence and then bolstering the shaky case against him by painting him as a Muslim extremist. (The affidavit that helped secure his arrest made much of the fact that he had converted to Islam, is married to an Egyptian-born woman and had once briefly represented a member of the "Portland Seven" in a child-custody case.) "Even though I was arrested as a material witness, don't be confused," Mayfield told NEWSWEEK in a phone interview Friday. "They were telling the judge and the world that they've got a fingerprint that's a 100 percent match ... What are the implications of that, legally? It's a death sentence."
Mayfield says the Feds left no doubt that they considered him a suspect, not a witness. When he was arrested at his office on May 6, FBI agents cuffed his hands behind his back. He asked them to remove the cuffs, explaining that he wanted to avoid public humiliation in the parking lot. "The agent said, 'Don't worry about it. The media is right behind us'," Mayfield recalls. "I was pretty blown away. Is this the way they do business? They call in the helicopters, SWAT teams, the whole world, the media?"
Spanish authorities put an end to the ordeal when they announced that the fingerprint actually belonged to Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian living in Spain. Mayfield was released May 20. The FBI, which once said it was absolutely certain the fingerprint was Mayfield's, now says the print is "of no value for identification purposes." One sign of how badly the case was handled: the FBI publicly apologized to Mayfield, something the bureau almost never does. Mayfield appreciates the mea culpa. "I commend them for stepping up to the plate ... and admitting they made a mistake," he says. "I'm from the Midwest, and an apology goes a long way."
But it still doesn't settle the most vexing question: how could the Feds have gotten it so wrong? The FBI has blamed the mistake on the poor quality of a digital copy of the print Spain provided, which confused even its best analysts. The bureau points out that an independent fingerprint analyst hired by Mayfield's defense team also agreed that the print was a match to Mayfield (a claim Mayfield's lawyers confirm). The Feds have further claimed that Spain also believed the FBI had a good match. But Spanish authorities insist that they always doubted the Mayfield connection. "At no time did we give our approval," a Spanish police official told NEWSWEEK. "We kept working on the identification ... Obviously we wouldn't have kept working on it if we were already 100 percent convinced."
The Mayfield case has, inevitably, led to questions about the reliability of fingerprints as a crime fighting tool, and the FBI will begin a major independent review of its methods. For Mayfield, that may be enough. Or maybe not. He's still mulling over the possibility of suing the government—giving his accusers a chance to be "material witnesses" themselves.
With Michael Isikoff, Eric Pape and Mike Elkin
|
To
send us your comments, questions, and suggestions click
here |