FBI bungled Oregon man’s arrest

The FBI was sloppy and arrogant in its investigation of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, but the agency did not misuse the Patriot Act or break any laws, according to a government report released Friday.

The review by the Office of the Inspector General – the Justice Department’s internal watchdog – found that FBI fingerprint experts made numerous mistakes in wrongly identifying a print as belonging to Mayfield during the investigation of the 2004 Madrid, Spain, train bombings.

Mayfield’s fingerprint was similar to the one found on a bag of detonators near the bombings, but FBI experts overlooked “important differences” between the prints, said Inspector General Glenn Fine. Furthermore, Fine said, the FBI ignored information from Spanish police that pointed to another suspect.

“We believe that the FBI Laboratory’s overconfidence in the skill and superiority of its examiners prevented it from taking the (Spanish report) as seriously as it should have,” said Fine, in a 20-page summary of the report. The full report, containing more than 270 pages, remains classified.

In his summary, Fine also said that FBI agents made inaccurate and vague statements to a federal judge to obtain warrants to search Mayfield’s Portland-area home and eventually to arrest Mayfield himself. Agents, for instance, led one judge to believe that U.S. and Spanish authorities agreed the print on the bag was Mayfield’s.

The fingerprint was eventually found to belong to an Algerian national, and the FBI, which held Mayfield in a Portland jail for two weeks – spending up to 22 hours a day in solitary confinement – released him and publicly admitted its mistake.

“We did not find any evidence that the FBI misused any of the provisions of the Patriot Act in conducting its investigation of Mayfield,” the Inspector General’s report said. “However, the increased information sharing allowed by the Patriot Act amplified the consequences of the FBI’s fingerprint misidentification.”

Mayfield, 39, is suing the FBI and the Department of Justice for violating his civil rights and invading his privacy.

Mayfield could not be reached for comment, but his attorney, Gerry Spence, said the report’s conclusions “substantiate Mr. Mayfield’s allegations that the FBI acted with gross negligence.”

Spence said the report also confirmed for him the belief that “if it were not for the Spanish police, Mr. Mayfield would have been charged with a death-penalty offense and probably convicted.”

The FBI released a statement from Washington, D.C., that said in part that Mayfield’s arrest in May 2004 “was based on an extremely unusual confluence of events,” and the agency had since implemented a number of measures to “minimize the risk of occurrence of a mistake.”

Those measures included a complete review of prior digital fingerprint identifications and a monthly review of cases involving death row inmates who were convicted or sentenced based on FBI fingerprint identification.

Mayfield claims the government unfairly targeted him because of his Muslim faith – something the FBI has vigorously denied.