Portland, Ore. – A lawyer the FBI wrongly arrested after the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombings because of a misidentified fingerprint has settled part of his lawsuit against the U.S. government for $2 million.
Brandon Mayfield, who said he was detained for two weeks in 2004, maintained he was arrested because of his Muslim faith.
“Not only does my detention as a material witness in the Madrid bombing underscore the fallacy that fingerprint identification is reliable, I hope the public will remember that the U.S. government also targeted me and my family because of our Muslim religion,” he said in a news release Wednesday.
The FBI referred calls for comment to the Justice Department, whose spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said the FBI has since adopted suggestions for improving its fingerprint-identification process “to ensure that what happened to Mr. Mayfield does not happen again.”
The U.S. issued a formal apology to Mayfield as part of the settlement, Scolinos said.
Mayfield was arrested in May 2004 on the basis of a fingerprint found on a bag of detonators in Madrid that was mistakenly matched to him after the March 11, 2004, train bombings that killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,500. Mayfield was jailed on a material-witness warrant but was released after the FBI acknowledged that the fingerprint was not his.
The government acknowledged in the settlement that it “performed covert physical searches of the Mayfield home and law office, and it also conducted electronic surveillance targeting Mr. Mayfield at both his home and law office,” according to a news release from Mayfield’s attorney, Elden Rosenthal.
The settlement allows Mayfield to continue to pursue his challenge of the USA Patriot Act, Rosenthal said. Mayfield claims the act violates the Fourth Amendment because it allows government searches without probable cause that a crime has been committed.
“The Patriot Act is decidedly not patriotic,” Rosenthal said.
