June 26, 2004
Pride In The 'System' And Disregarding Profiling
Public Defender Steve Wax At City Club Of Portland
Friday afternoon, Brandon Mayfield and his Federal public defender Steve Wax appeared before the City Club of Portland to discuss Mayfield's experiences of being wrongly targeted by the FBI due to a botched fingerprint match to a bag from the site of the Madrid train bombings. You can find the overall gist of Mayfield's comments in a story from today's Oregonian (or listen to an mp3 of the event). City Club made attempts to include a representative of Federal law enforcement, but to no avail:
... City Club officials said U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut and a representative of the FBI were invited to the forum, but they declined.
Immergut, in a letter that a City Club representative read aloud before Friday's forum, cited the secrecy of grand jury proceedings and potential civil litigation by Mayfield against the government as reasons for declining the invitation.
In fact, Club officials reportedly worked every connection and pulled every string they could think of. Without such a Federal representative, the discussion wasn't all it could be, but some comments by Wax provided clear opportunities to get into some important issues. Unfortunately, no Club members rose to the occasion. Since the Oregonian article essentially covers Mayfield's remarks and ignores Wax's contributions to the discussion (and although we might return later to get into some of Mayfield's remarks) we'll mainly focus on that aspect here.
While conceding to the troubling issues involved in Mayfield's detention, Wax suggested that we should take "pride in the system's response" because Mayfield in fact eventually was released. Wax stated that events transpired more quickly than he had ever before seen. "With lightning speed" is the prhase he used, although he admitted it probably seemed like "an eternity" to Mayfield himself.
What was lacking here was anyone making what we continue to believe is the obvious observation on this count: If this had been an entirely domestic affair, without the benefit of an outside third-party (the Spanish authorities) pushing back against the FBI's intransigence regarding the fingerprint identification, it's entirely arguable that Mayfield would still be in custody, and possibly as a defendant rather than as a material witness.
In other words, despite Wax's assertion that we take pride in how the "system" worked, it's not difficult to believe, looking at the full context of how the FBI behaved, that the System only worked because someone from outside the "system" with intimate knowledge of the case was continually applying pressure.
Wax also cautioned against presuming a bias on the part of the FBI or leveling accusations of profiling. Because we don't yet know precisely how the fingerprint misidentification happened (he argued), we can't claim the FBI simply profiled Mayfield.
But as we argued in the above-linked item we wrote at the beginning of this month, profiling isn't something that only can occur as the starting point or very rationale of a case. Bias and profiling and also inform how authorities construe a case that's already underway. Regardless of how the bogus fingerprint match happened, it seems clear from previous media reports on how things came togetehr afterward that once the FBI had an arrow pointing to a Muslim living in Portland, it became deaf, dumb, and blind to all other possibilities -- even with the Spanish authorities kicking them to see the truth of the evidence.
Unfortunately, here too no Club members bothered to challenge Wax's assertions. Maybe they simply assumed that since the only people on the "panel" were Mayfield and his attorney, anything they said inherently was supportive of Mayfield and so they simply didn't delve too deeply into what was being argued.
Comments (4)
myrln on 26 Jun 2004
Excellent point about the importance of the third party input in the matter. Indeed, as you say, Mayfield would be caught in another Ashcroft lie.
Isaac Laquedem on 27 Jun 2004
The fact is that the System didn't work, because if the System had worked, Mayfield would not have been arrested.
Jonathan on 27 Jun 2004
Well, of course the system worked. The system is not about arresting people who are guilty ... only about convicting people who are guilty. By definition, then, there will be those arrested who are not guilty. If you want to use the Mayfield case to attack the system, then attack the fact that Mayfield wasn't arrested (in a typical sense, post-indictment), he was simply held as a material witness. But since both Wax and Mayfield criticized the use of the material witness statute in his case, you can't say that Wax's support of the system ignored the problem of the material witness statute's application to Mayfield.
The One True b!X on 27 Jun 2004
But since both Wax and Mayfield criticized the use of the material witness statute in his case, you can't say that Wax's support of the system ignored the problem of the material witness statute's application to Mayfield.
No, but you can say that he ignored the fact that the system only "worked" in the sense that an outside force that wasn't a part of that system forced it to.