Wednesday, May 26, 2004
The Strange Case of Brandon Mayfield
So Brandon Mayfield is a former U.S. Army soldier who has converted to Islam, become a lawyer, and is now representing members of the "Portland Seven", who were arrested on terrorism-related charges. Recently, he was picked up on charges that his fingerprints matched prints found in Madrid:
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"Days after the train bombings in Madrid last March killed 191 people, the Spanish authorities, unable to find a match with a set of fingerprints found on a plastic bag full of detonators, sent the Federal Bureau of Investigation a digital copy, hoping the bureau could find what they could not.Pretty bizarre. Was he in Spain around the time of the March 11 bombings? Do any of the bomb materials trace back to him? Of the billions of people in the world, how did the FBI come up with what they thought were his fingerprints? The NYT even says:
The F.B.I. quickly and confidently found a match to a Portland-area lawyer, setting in motion a chain of events that led the authorities in the United States to link the wrong man to those fingerprints, tie him to Islamic terrorists, arrest him on a material-witness warrant, jail him for 14 days, drop the entire case on Monday and then face withering questions about how the investigation could have gone so wrong.
Court records unsealed Tuesday showed that the Spanish authorities had raised questions about the F.B.I.'s fingerprint match to the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, 37, weeks before his May 6 arrest. Yet F.B.I. officials were so confident of a match they described as "100 percent," the court papers show, that they never bothered to look at the original print while they were in Madrid on April 21, meeting with Spanish investigators."
"The people in the lab looking at the fingerprint had no idea what Mr. Mayfield's background was," said an F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "That had absolutely no role in any of this."If that is true, it is as coincidental as Nick Berg's random encounter with an acquaintance of Zacarias Moussaoui, which I still find hard to believe. I wonder if the FBI is trying to taint him, in order to hurt his defense of one of the "Portland Seven"? I assume we will hear more about this, but it's already getting a little weird.
