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U.S. ignores civil liberties in pursuit of terrorists
(Tomas Alex Tizon, Sebastian Rotella and Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2004)
A federal judge's decision to release Muslim lawyer Brandon Mayfield rallied critics of the Justice Department on Friday, who decried his jailing in Oregon on dubious fingerprint evidence as a new example of government disregard for civil liberties. . . . The decision by U.S. District Judge Robert Jones in Portland coincided with Spanish authorities' determination that the print linked to the March 11 train bombings in Madrid belonged to an Algerian suspect. . . . The sudden turn in the case is "a huge embarrassment" for federal investigators . . . Mayfield, 37, a convert to Islam, maintains a small immigration and family-law practice in Portland. He was ordered released by Jones on Thursday. He had been held in a Portland jail since May 6, after the FBI said it had matched his fingerprint to one on a bag containing detonators that was found near a Madrid railway station. . . . He was never charged — his family said he had not left the U.S. in over a decade — but he was held under a law that permits the government to detain witnesses who are considered flight risks. . . . As Mayfield settled back into his home in a modest Portland suburb, receiving offers of free rent for his law office, criticism grew over the government's handling of his case. . . . The Mayfield case is just the latest and highest-profile of "a long line of mistaken detentions" that show how the material witness law can be abused, said Greenberger, the former Justice Department official. . . . The law was intended to hold witnesses for trials. Instead the government has used the law to hold suspects while investigators build cases against them. These suspects are usually held with the general prison population and subjected to constant interrogation. . . . "It was never, never intended to be used this way," said Greenberger. He suspects there are others still in detention who have not received the kind of publicity that Mayfield has received. . . . The Mayfield case reflects "incompetence" among FBI forensics experts, and a tendency among federal investigators to reach a conclusion first, and then make the evidence fit the conclusion, Cohen said. . . . "The FBI is now the political police of this government," Cohen said.

posted by LoZo 8:49 PM