Vengeance is Brandon Mayfield's
Falsely accused of being a terrorist, the Oregon lawyer wanted something more from the government than a cash settlement. He's fighting the Patriot Act -- and so far, he's winning.
By Garrett Epps
Pages 1 2
Oct. 3, 2007 | PORTLAND, Ore. -- "Someone must have slandered Joseph K," begins Franz Kafka's classic novel "The Trial," "for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."
Last week America's own Joseph K., the terrorist who was not a terrorist, got a little more revenge on the government that had persecuted him. Brandon Mayfield, falsely accused of involvement in the Madrid train bombings of 2004, has already collected a hefty cash settlement; on Sept. 26, a federal judge in Portland, Ore., ruled that the two Patriot Act provisions the government had used against him violate the Constitution. Though the ruling will be strongly challenged on appeal, its larger importance may be as another straw in a judicial wind blowing against the Bush administration's contemptuous treatment of the Constitution and the courts.
These days, Mayfield lives much as he has for the past decade or so, practicing family law from a small solo office next to a strip mall on the southern edge of Portland. He is a slight man, 41 years old, who likes to take his lunch at a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant. In many ways, what's most interesting about Mayfield is how utterly unexceptional he is. He was born in Kansas and got his law degree from Washburn University in Topeka. An Army veteran, he is married, with three children, and lives with his family in a nearby suburb with the homey name of Aloha.
Almost the only vaguely exotic thing about Brandon Mayfield is his religion: He is a Muslim convert and belongs to a local mosque. But like Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French writer whom he likes to quote and who helped define the American spirit, Mayfield worries that in a democratic system, the tendency of government will be to augment its power at the expense of minorities. “I’m suspicious of government anyway,” he said in an interview last week. And it's not hard to conclude that Mayfield's one deviation from the norm, the thing that makes him a minority, explains why, for a few weeks in 2004, he was one of the most famous people in the world.
On May 6, 2004, FBI agents descended on his law office, his home, and the family farm in Kansas to search for evidence that Mayfield was a terror mastermind. Media leaks let it be known that he was responsible for the bombing of the Madrid train station in March 2004, which killed 191 people. The evidence was said to be a fingerprint found on a plastic bag of detonators at the scene. Federal agents threw Mayfield into the Portland city lockup not as a defendant but as a "material witness."
But not only had Mayfield been far from Madrid at the time of the bombing, he hadn't even left the United States since 1994. The FBI, however, insisted that his Army fingerprint matched a digital photo of the print from the Madrid bag. The Spanish police, who had the original fingerprint, were never convinced that Mayfield's was a match. But that didn't stop the FBI from swearing to a judge that it was.
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/03/brandon_mayfield/
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