Perspective

by David J. Weidman, Esquire

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."

James Madison, speech to Virginia constitutional convention, Richmond, Virginia, December 2, 1829.

Imagine for moment that you are sitting at your desk reading this editorial to take respite from your work, eager to flip past this story to more interesting fodder, like who may have been publicly sanctioned by ODC. Without notice, a man and a woman appear at your door, show you badges, announce that they are FBI agents, state that you are under arrest as a material witness in a terrorist investigation, and take you to DCC to be detained, without charges. Your head spins, as your world as you know it ends. Your colleagues wonder what you did. Your family queries whether they really know you. Your clients abandon you forever. Your practice is in ruins.

Sound like fiction? Think again. Earlier this year, a lawyer named Brandon Mayfield, a 37 year old convert to Islam, was arrested by the FBI as a “material witness” because a partial digital fingerprint discovered 4000 miles away on a bag of detonators used in the Madrid bombings, constituted a “possible match” with Mayfield’s fingerprint.

You ask, naturally, why was Mayfield’s fingerprint in the database at all? It appears that Mr. Mayfield engaged in a rather juvenile act while he was a teenager in 1984, and was caught for a burglary while he lived in Wichita, Kansas. He paid for his crime, but the fingerprint is now indelibly etched in the database forever. Mr. Mayfield, like many people who have done stupid things in their youth, (including me, although I was never arrested for anything) learned from his crime, and later obtained an education, and became a lawyer. When the FBI arrested him, he ran a small law office in Portland, Oregon. Aside from his arrest, the FBI raided his home (he has a family), took his personal papers, and his computer. It turns out that the FBI got it all wrong.

The FBI later apologized publicly to Mr. Mayfield and his family “for the hardships that this matter has caused.” It appears that the “mistaken arrest” sprang from an error by the FBI’s supercomputer for matching fingerprints, and that the error was compounded by the FBI’s analysts.

When I read the story about Mr. Mayfield, I was forced to question some fundamental beliefs that I held about our justice system. For example, I am conservative when it comes to crime, and I believe in the death penalty, with many caveats. I am also frustrated, like many Americans, with the seemingly endless rights afforded to defendants. Most importantly, however, I previously possessed an inherent trust of our government. Not anymore.

Initially, I felt guilty about questioning my faith in my government to do the right thing. But I soon realized that my doubts about my government were supported by good company. Our Founding Fathers, those rebels who drafted the Declaration of Independence, those same geniuses who created the Constitution, did not trust a centralized government with unbridled power either. I felt better about my changing belief system.

What is the point to all of this? The point is that our government has made serious errors in the past (remember the Japanese internment camps?) regarding our fundamental liberties, and today, the only check on the government’s awesome ability to abuse its power is our judicial system. In our system of justice, the symbol that represents our notion of fairness is a blindfolded woman holding in her hands the scales of neutrality, representing equal justice for all, despite our backgrounds, faith, race, and economic status. Today, the role of the judiciary is more important than ever, given the awesome resources of the government and its seeming willingness to strip us of our liberty at a moment’s notice. I wonder how Mr. Mayfield, a trained lawyer, feels about our government now?

I am angry about what happened to Mr. Mayfield. We should all be angry, because what happened to Mr. Mayfield could possibly happen to any one of us someday, or our children. And for any government official who may be reading this editorial, or who may read it one day in the future, I have a parting thought for you before you make a decision that could trample upon a fellow citizen’s liberties:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing besides remains, Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Return to September 2004 Table of Contents.