[LANMaster]

I hadn't heard about his door.

I really don't know much about the guy, so I'm counting on you two to steer me right if I get the data wrong. Was the patriot act used in any way on the "person of interest"?

[~Candy~]

Where is angelize live at 5 when you need her

I'm sure she can dig something up for you LAN. I remember hearing his wife being interviewed.

[angelize56]

Not sure what specifics you want on the case! So here you go:

The Wrong Man
By Andrew Murr

Newsweek June 7, 2004 issue -

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 crimefighting 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.

[Stoner]

Originally Posted by LANMaster

I hadn't heard about his door.

I really don't know much about the guy, so I'm counting on you two to steer me right if I get the data wrong. Was the patriot act used in any way on the "person of interest"?

You might say the Feds put his life on hold

[angelize56]

I did dig up that Mayfield is supposedly a supporter of Mike Hawash. Here's a blurb on Hawash:

A software engineer pleaded guilty Wednesday to a charge of aiding the Taliban, agreeing to testify against other suspects in exchange for the dropping of other terrorism charges. Maher “Mike” Hawash, one of the so-called “Portland Seven,” will serve at least seven years in federal prison under the deal, which was approved by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. - Andrew Kramer

[~Candy~]

Brandon Mayfield's house is still in disarray - after FBI officials confiscated much of the family's belongings, including his three childrens' computers, a little more than two weeks ago.

In addition, Mayfield's family challenged authorities to check his passport - saying the attorney had not been out of the country in at least 10 years.

But the FBI refused to budge, said two senior law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C., who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Within two days of his arrest, the balance seemed to be tipping in Mayfield's favor after Spanish officials began to voice strong doubts that the fingerprint found on the bag was really his.

Mayfield is being held as a material witness under a federal statute designed to protect the identity of grand jury witnesses. The statute is designed to secure the testimony of someone with information "material" to an alleged crime. The law is most commonly used when potential witnesses may be reluctant to cooperate, in danger or likely to flee. The law allowing those detentions has been on the books for years.

It was unclear why Mayfield was booked into the Justice Center jail under the false name of Randy Taylor on Thursday evening.




Some excerpts from news I have found.....yet they held him in jail for TWO WEEKS.

[angelize56]

In regards to his supposedly having been a supporter of Hawash....this is from the article I posted:

"had once briefly represented a member of the "Portland Seven" in a child-custody case"

Yeah....some supporter! Sounds like he was just doing his job!

[bassetman]

Originally Posted by AcaCandy

He was so finely treated by the U.S. Remember he had his door broken down etc.?

Candy, now you know that A$$crof...I mean the Gov. would only do this if they already knew he was guilty!

[angelize56]

The official FBI apology.

For Immediate Release
May 24, 2004 Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office
(202) 324-3691

Statement on Brandon Mayfield Case

After the March terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Madrid, digital images of partial latent fingerprints obtained from plastic bags that contained detonator caps were submitted by Spanish authorities to the FBI for analysis. The submitted images were searched through the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). An IAFIS search compares an unknown print to a database of millions of known prints. The result of an IAFIS search produces a short list of potential matches. A trained fingerprint examiner then takes the short list of possible matches and performs an examination to determine whether the unknown print matches a known print in the database.

Using standard protocols and methodologies, FBI fingerprint examiners determined that the latent fingerprint was of value for identification purposes. This print was subsequently linked to Brandon Mayfield. That association was independently analyzed and the results were confirmed by an outside experienced fingerprint expert.

Soon after the submitted fingerprint was associated with Mr. Mayfield, Spanish authorities alerted the FBI to additional information that cast doubt on our findings. As a result, the FBI sent two fingerprint examiners to Madrid, who compared the image the FBI had been provided to the image the Spanish authorities had.

Upon review it was determined that the FBI identification was based on an image of substandard quality, which was particularly problematic because of the remarkable number of points of similarity between Mr. Mayfield's prints and the print details in the images submitted to the FBI.

The FBI's Latent Fingerprint Unit will be reviewing its current practices and will give consideration to adopting new guidelines for all examiners receiving latent print images when the original evidence is not included.

The FBI also plans to ask an international panel of fingerprint experts to review our examination in this case.

The FBI apologizes to Mr. Mayfield and his family for the hardships that this matter has caused.

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel...ield052404.htm

[LANMaster]

Has he been charged?

[plschwartz]

washingtonpost.com

The Achilles' Heel of Fingerprints

By Jennifer L. Mnookin

Saturday, May 29, 2004; Page A27

Three highly skilled FBI fingerprint experts declared this year that Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield's fingerprint matched a partial print found on a bag in Madrid that contained explosive detonators. U.S. officials called it "absolutely incontrovertible" and a "bingo match." Mayfield was promptly taken into custody as a material witness. Last week the FBI admitted that it goofed; the print actually belongs to Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian.

Fingerprint evidence has long been considered an infallible form of proof, powerful enough to support a criminal conviction even without any other evidence. But when three top experts manage to blow such an important identification, our longstanding faith in fingerprints must be questioned. Nor is this the only such mistake to come to light in recent months. In January a Massachusetts conviction was overturned when the fingerprint identification, the cornerstone of the case, was shown to be erroneous.

In fact, the science of fingerprinting is surprisingly underdeveloped. We lack good evidence about how often examiners make mistakes, nor is there a consensus about how to determine what counts as a match. Our current approach to fingerprint evidence, in which experts claim 100 percent confidence in any match, is dangerously flawed and risks causing miscarriages of justice.

In Mayfield's case, the FBI located 15 points of similarity, places where the particular ridge characteristics of two prints "matched." Even the Spanish authorities, though doubtful about the match, identified eight points of similarity. While many American examiners no longer exclusively count points, experts have declared positive fingerprint matches in court after finding even fewer than eight points.

Different examiners and jurisdictions set their own standards, and the courts in the United States have left the definition of a match up to the experts themselves. Though defense attorneys have in recent years mounted challenges in court to the reliability of fingerprinting, judges have largely turned a deaf ear. What happened to Mayfield should encourage them to listen more closely.

Fingerprinting, unlike DNA evidence, currently lacks any valid statistical foundation. This is gravely troubling. Even if we assume the unproven hypothesis that each fingerprint is unique when examined at a certain level of detail, the important question is how often two people might have fingerprints sufficiently similar that a competent examiner could believe they came from the same person. This problem is accentuated when analyzing a partial print, as those recovered from crime scenes frequently are. How often might one part of someone's fingerprint strongly resemble part of someone else's print? No good data on this question exist.

The growing size of computer fingerprint databases makes this issue still more acute. As a database grows in size, the probability that a number of people will have strikingly similar prints also grows. Instead of ignoring the issue, forensic scientists need to investigate the frequencies of different ridge characteristics and develop difficult proficiency tests that examine the capability of fingerprint experts to accurately differentiate between superficially similar prints.

The FBI called the resemblance between Mayfield and Daoud's prints "remarkable." What is truly remarkable is that we simply do not know how often different people's prints may significantly resemble one another, or how good examiners are at distinguishing between such prints. DNA profiling provides what is called a "random match probability": the odds that the DNA of someone picked at random would match the profile in question. With fingerprinting, we entirely lack the information to provide an equivalent statistic. Yet without this knowledge we cannot accurately evaluate the evidentiary value of a supposed fingerprint match.

The Mayfield misidentification also reveals the danger that extraneous knowledge might influence experts' evaluations. If any of those FBI fingerprint examiners who confidently declared the match already knew that Mayfield was himself a convert to Islam who had once represented a convicted Taliban sympathizer in a child custody dispute, this knowledge may have subconsciously primed them to "see" the match. Fingerprint identification as it is now practiced is not like a double-blind scientific study. Examiners, typically law-enforcement employees, are frequently privy to outside knowledge about a case, which creates a genuine risk that their examination will inadvertently be contaminated. There is simply no excuse for failing to develop internal procedures to protect examiners from extraneous knowledge.

Until now, many people in the field of fingerprinting have defensively resisted calls for additional research and investigation of fingerprinting. Because experts are permitted to testify about "100 percent positive" matches and to claim in court an error rate for the technique of zero, they have little incentive to support any research. No matter how accurate fingerprint identification turns out to be, it cannot be as perfect as they claim.

But what befell Mayfield is embarrassing enough that it may end the defensive posturing and prompt fingerprint experts to acknowledge the acute need for better information and more caution. If this error leads fingerprint experts, judges and lawmakers to throw their support behind additional study and procedural reform, there will at least be a silver lining.

The writer is a law professor at the University of Virginia. She is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[~Candy~]

Originally Posted by LANMaster

Has he been charged?

No, LAN, they just (Cheney's word ) up his life

I find this excerpt quite disturbing as well:

Material witness warrants, usually kept confidential by a federal judge, are used by the government to hold people suspected of having direct knowledge about a crime or to allow time for further investigation into the witness. Suspects may be held indefinitely without formal charges.



So much for confidential

What is remarkable, PL, is all the EVIDENCE leaning towards him not being guilty.

Nice that they apologize though

[bassetman]

Originally Posted by angelize56

The official FBI apology.

For Immediate Release
May 24, 2004 Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office
(202) 324-3691

...
The FBI apologizes to Mr. Mayfield and his family for the hardships that this matter has caused.

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel...ield052404.htm

They almost (or did) ruin his life and he gets an appology!?

[~Candy~]

Originally Posted by bassetman

They almost (or did) ruin his life and he gets an appology!?

Yep, and if it can happen to him It can happen to anyone. That is what people just don't get.

[bassetman]

Besides Lan, I have a couple of other friends, that think our government would never abuse their new found unlimited power!