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July 15, 2005
Mayfield's attorneys tell U.S. government:
Sorry isn't enough
Portland, Oregon - U.S. government attorneys repeatedly apologized again for having wrongly arrested Portland lawyer Brandon Mayfield in connection with the deadly Madrid train bombings, but his attorneys told a federal court Friday that sorry wasn't enough.
A little more than a year ago in May 2004, the bespectacled Mayfield sat in a holding cell inside Portland's federal courthouse, suspected of involvement in bombings that ripped through commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people that March.
Mayfield's fingerprints, the FBI said, were found on a bag of detonators near the scene of the carnage -- prints which three senior agents analyzed and vetted. But their analysis was wrong and they later said the prints belonged to someone else.
Now, a year and two months after FBI officials released Mayfield and first apologized for bungling the fingerprint examination -- the 39-year-old man returned to the courthouse, this time wearing a suit instead of prison scrubs and accompanied by a team of attorneys to sue the U.S. government.
During a pretrial hearing in a packed U.S. District courtroom, government attorneys expressed their regret for Mayfield's two-week incarceration, calling the incident an "unfortunate mistake," but they refused to bend on the key issues of his civil suit, filed last October.
"This is case of a reasonable mistake," said U.S. Department of Justice attorney Richard Montague. "He's an innocent man, husband, father, attorney, member of this community. But that was not apparent at the time."
But celebrity attorney Gerry Spence, Mayfield's lead lawyer, pointed his finger at the table of government lawyers and said: "Although they say 'We're really sorry,' we haven't had an opportunity to say if sorry is enough."
Mayfield alleges his civil liberties were violated and that he was singled out because of his conversion to the Muslim faith. He is seeking unspecified damages.
He is also asking the government to return to him the copies of personal effects seized from his home during secret searches conducted prior to his arrest. And more importantly, he wants the sections of the Patriot Act, the law which authorized those secret searches and the installation of wiretaps, to be declared unconstitutional.
An internal FBI e-mail released this week with court documents said agents did not have enough evidence to charge Mayfield with a crime as the FBI raced to make an arrest before reporters found out Mayfield was a suspect.
The FBI instead arrested Mayfield as a "material witness" under a law originally intended to protect witnesses but now criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights advocates as a tool to hold suspects without charging them with a crime.
Mayfield's legal team contends that there is plenty of evidence to show that the FBI was not on firm footing when they made their arrest.
On March 11, 2004, soon after 10 bombs ripped through commuter trains in the Spanish capital, Spanish police found a bag of detonators under the passenger seat of a stolen van parked not far from one of the train stations.
Fingerprints recovered from the bag were sent to the FBI a few days later, where a computer program returned 20 candidates -- including Mayfield's, which the computer ranked as the fourth most-likely match, courts records show.
Mayfield maintains that it was his Muslim faith which led the three agents -- who each analyzed and vetted the print -- to fixate on his fingerprint, rather than the others.
That, Mayfield argues, blindsided their analysis, leading investigators to arrest the soft-spoken lawyer who has never traveled to Spain, even after Spanish forensic experts met with FBI agents to convince them that their analysis was wrong.
Spence also argued that the FBI deceived U.S. District Judge Robert Jones, who issued the warrant for Mayfield's arrest last May without ever learning that Spanish investigators had raised serious doubts about the match. The FBI instead told the judge that Mayfield's print was a "100 percent positive" match with the one found in Madrid.
The government offered Mayfield the chance to go to arbitration to resolve some of the issues in the lawsuit. But Spence told the court that many of the issues, especially regarding the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, are "nonnegotiable."
Mayfield's attorneys contend that it was only through the powers accorded to the FBI through the Patriot Act, that agents were able to obtain permission to wiretap Mayfield's home and office and to secretly enter his residence to gather personal items.
A convert to Islam, Mayfield has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice, arguing he was singled out because of his faith. He also contends that key sections of the Patriot Act, which he says were used to install wiretaps and conduct secret searches of his home, are unconstitutional.
The act broadened the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, which allows federal agents to collect information on suspected terrorists. The Patriot Act now permits that information to be used in criminal prosecutions.
The case is being closely watched by civil rights activists because it challenges some of the powers of the Patriot Act, which was passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to give the government more leeway in gathering intelligence. The Patriot Act is currently up for renewal and lawmakers are tweaking some of its provisions.
The hearing drew a crowd of spectators -- judges, lawyers, legal clerks and law students, along with U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut and the three federal prosecutors assigned to the Mayfield case last year. They filled U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken's courtroom to capacity in less than 10 minutes, forcing security staff to open another room where the public could watch the proceedings. (Media reports)
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