Bomb Case Against Oregon Lawyer Is Rejected

from the NY Times: 2 weeks ago Brandon Mayfield was arrested and detained for questioning in Madrid, in connection with the pre-election bombings in Spain. Yesterday, a Federal judge threw out the case, due to a false-positive reading from a fingerprint analysis performed on a plastic bag found near the scene.

Mr. Mayfield shook as he spoke at his news conference earlier in the day, thanking his family and supporters. "This is a serious infringement on our civil liberties," Mr. Mayfield said. He added, "In a climate of fear, this war on terrorism has gone to the extreme and innocent people are victims as a result." At a news conference in Portland and in court documents, the F.B.I. explained how the fingerprint error had happened. But those explanations did little to dilute what was clearly an embarrassment for the government. The Mayfield episode is likely to lead to calls for a broad examination of both the laboratory work by the F.B.I. and the increasingly aggressive the Justice Department's use of the federal material witness statute to detain people who it says may have information about a crime. The Justice Department is known to have used the statute at least 50 times since the Sept. 11 attacks, and civil liberties advocates said Monday that the Mayfield case demonstrated the potential for abuse. "This is indicative of how the Justice Department has overreached and cut constitutional corners since 9/11," said David Fidanque, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. "The Justice Department is using the material witness statute in a way that it was never meant to be used, and this is just the most dramatic example of that trend." Mr. Mayfield said that in the weeks before his arrest he had sensed that he was being watched and that things were not quite right in the house, in the Portland suburb of Aloha, where he lives with his wife, Mona, an Egyptian immigrant, and their three children. He said a bolt on the front door had been locked, when no one in the family used it. Blinds were raised higher than usual, and there was a large footprint in the living room carpet, much larger than the shoe sizes of any of the Mayfields, he said. "I feel that I was being surveyed or watched," he said. "Any of us sitting in this room could be subject to it. They will fiddle around with your possessions; they may take things or bring them back. People should wake up, is what I'm saying. We need to start protecting our civil liberties. You can't trade your freedom for security, because if you do, you're going to lose both."