The Rights of the People (33 page)

After a month following him around, sneaking into his house and office, going through files covered by attorney-client privilege, monitoring his conversations, looking over his finances, and even doing a “trash pull” of garbage discarded from his law office, the FBI had “no additional evidence linking Mayfield to the bombings,” according to one internal memo. Quoting a lead case agent, the document said: “If he is guilty, he is one cool customer.”

And that was the preferable theory, not the possibility that Mayfield
was actually innocent. So the agile minds of the investigators created two possible scenarios to keep the presumption of Mayfield’s guilt alive. As recorded in a summary of the investigation approved by leading agents in Portland, they went like this:

As erroneous as it was, the fingerprint identification became indisputable fact in the agents’ minds, the fulcrum of their analysis. Everything pivoted on that error. The overwhelming lack of evidence from the extensive surveillance and searches seemed to carry no weight—and for understandable reason, according to Mayfield’s lawyers. The lab had already bet its reputation on the supposed match, insisting after repeated queries that it was a “100% identification.”

Not only professionals’ careers but future confidence in the fingerprinting technique itself were at stake. So by the climax of the case, his lawyers wrote in a brief, “The FBI was willing to subject Mr. Mayfield and his family to his public branding as a mass murderer, and an international terrorist, and subject Mr. Mayfield to the ultimate penalty of death, in order to save their own jobs, the reputation of the FBI, and in order to secure the admissibility of the alleged science of fingerprint [analysis] in the courts.”
⁴¹
In the end, he was just barely saved by the solid competence and expertise of the Spanish National Police. It is frightening to think what might have happened to him if there had been no other law enforcement agency to contradict the FBI.

FISA warrants have time limits of ninety days, and although judges can extend them, they cannot be used indefinitely. The FBI figured that by the end of May it would turn off the surveillance, analyze the results thoroughly, and then attempt to interview Mayfield in June to see what
he knew about the Madrid bombings. Somewhere along the line, though, Mayfield stopped being a “cool customer” and started getting suspicious.

He had no inkling of the fantastic web of conjecture being spun by the FBI, of course, but he started checking to see if he was being followed. He “began an attempt to make surveillance, as apparent from his driving,” one FBI document reported. “He engaged in pulling into driveways and cul-de-sacs, only to quickly turn around. He would drive into parking lots, sit for a few moments, and then pull out. He circled his residence several times and drove slowly. When he eventually pulled into the driveway, he sat in the car for an extended period.”
⁴²
Mayfield confirmed this for me, saying that he “sometimes took various routes to verify the presence of the surveillance and watched for unusual vehicles out front or across the street from our house.”

The FBI began to get nervous that he might flee or destroy some imagined evidence. The anxiety was compounded when leaks, possibly from Interpol, started appearing in the press that an American’s fingerprint had been discovered in the Madrid case.

The timetable was then accelerated. The FBI applied for ordinary criminal search warrants of Mayfield’s home and office, and, because there was “not enough evidence to arrest him on a criminal charge,” an FBI official in Portland conceded,
⁴³
a warrant was issued to seize him as a “material witness.”

Intending to interview him, agents went to his office May 6 armed with the arrest warrant in case he wouldn’t cooperate. And he would not. When they knocked on the door, he told them that he had privileged client information inside, that he wanted them to leave, and that he would consider answering any written questions they cared to submit. Without telling him what their visit was about, they then handcuffed him, took him away, and searched his office. At the same time, the FBI detained Mona at home, executed an ordinary search warrant on the house, froze his financial accounts, and sent agents elsewhere in the country to question his mother, father, brother, and stepfather.

To disguise their tactics and protect their “witness,” the agents booked Mayfield under the pseudonym Randy Taylor, and the FBI refused for a time to tell Mona where he was being held. It was in a county jail full of inmates, some dangerous, who wouldn’t be expected to greet a suspected terrorist with high-fives. Mayfield feared that they might learn the reason he was there.

“The guards would sometimes call me Brandon, sometimes Randy,” he
said, “and it would make me nervous because I was worried I was getting closer to being exposed. I didn’t want any vigilante justice.”

Mostly he was alone in a cell. But there were moments of risk. “You have people jailed next to you who are maybe innocent like myself,” he observed, “but some are hardened. I was in a lockdown situation the first week with people who are most dangerous,” and in that week “I had an hour a day to walk the floor. Usually you’d walk with one or two other people on the floor. Some of them I was OK walking with, others I was very uncomfortable walking with.”

Little news penetrated the cellblock walls, fortunately. The television set in the middle of the common room was usually tuned to a country music station or to Black Entertainment Television, “and I was OK with that,” Mayfield said, but “occasionally somebody would go to a news channel, and I just prayed they didn’t have anything about me.”

Then one day as he sat on an upside-down trash can watching, with another prisoner behind him, there suddenly appeared “a short clip about me,” he said. “So this one guy, I could tell he had made the connection. He got up and went to his cell and his complete demeanor changed, and I figured it was just a matter of time until word got around.”

Mayfield’s most acute vulnerability came during transfers to and from court, when federal marshals “would put me in a jail cell for extended periods of time without any supervision, sometimes with one or two, sometimes with eight or nine.” Yet he was never attacked by prisoners, just “manhandled a little bit” by FBI agents and marshals.

“I had manacles on my feet, chains on my arms, and chains around my abdomen when I was transported from place to place,” he noted, and the chain between his legs once caught on the lip of a van’s door as he got out. “I tripped,” he said, “and barely caught myself before I broke my nose on the pavement. I sprained my wrist and hurt my shoulder,” and “this grumpy little marshal,” as Mayfield described him, “just stood there with a smirk and a smile, doesn’t help me get up.”

He endured insults from guards but no beatings. “I think the jailers for the most part were professionals,” he conceded. But “the toilets wouldn’t flush, you were sleeping there with your own feces,” and “some female jailer said when I complained about the toilet not flushing, ‘He’s just a crybaby.’ ” It got worse, but in ways that he labeled “too personal” to recount. “I felt the whole thing was an abusive, humiliating experience.… I was subject to strip searches: I couldn’t see my family without a strip search. You wouldn’t have a face-to-face—even with my attorney—without a strip search.”

During Mayfield’s two weeks inside, the FBI stood by its fingerprint match and the Spanish police stood by their denial, and the FBI would not be convinced of its error until a fragile trail of evidence in Madrid led the Spanish authorities to the man who had actually left the prints on the bag.

On April 3, when the Spanish police raided a suburban apartment to arrest alleged bombers, the suspects blew themselves up, leaving in the debris documents bearing the name Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian whose fingerprints happened to be on file because of an immigration violation. Six weeks later, checking his prints against those on the bag, Spanish examiners made two matches: Daoud’s right middle finger had left LFP 17, they concluded, and his right thumb had made the other legible print. It was May 15, and Mayfield was in jail. On May 19 the police arrested Daoud, and the next day Mayfield was released to home detention while the FBI, trying to wipe egg off its face, pondered the Daoud, Mayfield, and latent prints.

On May 22, two FBI examiners arrived in Madrid, on yet another taxpayer-funded trip, this time to collect copies of Daoud’s ten-print cards, which they took to Quantico on May 23. An all-night reexamination was conducted by a team at the lab, which concluded that LFP 17 was of “no value,” a reluctant and partial retreat. Only in late June did the FBI finally concede that the prints on the bag were Daoud’s.

Could this happen again? The lab at Quantico may work more accurately now. It agreed to implement over one hundred recommendations for improving various technical and administrative procedures suggested by eight internal review teams.
⁴⁴
In response to my inquiries, however, the FBI declined to offer any evidence that it had taken any action against the agents and analysts who had cost an American his good name and his sense of security, and the taxpayers millions. Nor was the bureau willing to say that it had made good on its public pledge to review death-penalty convictions that had relied on fingerprints; officials were content to leave the impression that neither of these steps had been taken.
⁴⁵

More striking was the FBI’s statement the day a lawsuit by Mayfield and his family was settled by the Justice Department for $2 million and a formal apology. There could have been no more complete admission of guilt by the government, yet the head of the Portland FBI office, Robert Jordan, declared: “If a similar investigation was being conducted, and we were provided a fingerprint identification, we would do exactly what we did in the case of Mr. Mayfield. Of course we regret what happened
to Mr. Mayfield, but again, we are proud of what we did here.”
⁴⁶
Proud?

Mayfield was cleared, but he was not released from the sleeplessness, the “mental distractions,” as he called them, the diffuse haze of anxiety. “I’m not as focused as I was before,” he said nearly three years later. “I’m not quite sure why. I was more driven, I was more into my work.” He now functioned less efficiently, he felt. “Once this has happened, you’re always wondering, is this going to happen again? Am I really safe now? Are they going to come knock in my door again? Is my family going to be thrown upside down in their lives? I try not to think about those things. You try to get on with your life.”

I asked if he had sought counseling, whether he might suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. “PTSD?” he answered. “I don’t want to use that term. It would belittle the experience of others. I had sleep disorders for a long time. You’d awake in the middle of the night and think there was someone there.… It’s pretty traumatic, what happened, what you go through physically and emotionally. It’s probably hard for people to appreciate how it affects someone.” Nevertheless, he added, “I was the fortunate one, in jail for two weeks in shackles and chains, and under house arrest for a week. There are people for whom that goes on for months or years.”

But something was still going on, for the experience had planted insidious seeds of wariness. “I was suspicious of people I know. Were they informants? People I maybe trusted and maybe I shouldn’t have trusted them? They weren’t who they appeared to be?” He didn’t get the support that he needed from fellow Muslims, because many who had rallied behind the Portland Seven had felt shocked and betrayed by their guilty pleas after they’d tried to fight in Afghanistan. The same people could not shake misgivings about Mayfield, and he paraphrased their thinking: “Even though we think he’s innocent, how do we know?”

His practice suffered. “I lost clients at the time I was arrested,” he said, including a personal-injury case he was working on that day. “I had retainers I had to give back. I had to seek help from other attorneys.… I lost money immediately. The practice had to shut down. My wife helps as a part-time paralegal, but there was no way she could keep the office open.”

Even after his two weeks in jail, business didn’t exactly spring back to normal, in part because clients were afraid that he was still under surveillance. “When you practice in the area of immigration, it’s not unusual to have somebody come to you and say, ‘My spouse slipped across the
border without documentation,’ ” Mayfield noted. “Sometimes people will tell you things that they will only say in confidence to an attorney or a priest.

“After I was arrested, I had a guy come to the office. He knew what had happened to me. He started to tell me a little bit about his case, he stopped and looked at me and said, ‘Before I go on, is your place bugged?’ I smiled and said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t say it isn’t.’ He said, ‘I’m pretty sure it is.’ We had to remove ourselves and go to a coffee shop and continue our initial client interview. I’ve had other people say they’re not comfortable because they think my office is bugged. There are lots of attorneys in the phone book.”

Some clients have less specific apprehensions. After a woman hired Mayfield to file a personal-injury lawsuit, she told him that a friend had advised: “ ‘You might not want to stick with Brandon because of all the baggage tied to him; it may affect the kind of settlement you can get.’ That client, to her credit, did stick with me, and I got a good result.” But he lost others.