“That’s Not My Fingerprint, Your Honor”

 

Lawyer Saved By The Spanish National Police From FBI Terrorist Frame-up

 

By Hans Sherrer

 

Justice:Denied magazine, Issue 25, Summer 2004, pp. 11-14, 19

 

It is easy to think – “It won’t happen to me” – when one hears of a person wrongly accused or convicted of a heinous crime. However, the lack of critical judicial examination of police agency arrest and search warrant affidavits creates an environment where any one of us at any time can have our life shattered by being falsely implicated in a capital crime. That is the cautionary message of Brandon Mayfield’s saga of how he was wrongly fingered by the FBI as an international terrorist involved in murderous bombings in a country he has never visited.

 

 

FBI Affidavit Tagged Brandon Mayfield As A Terrorist

 

Attorney Brandon Mayfield was arrested by the FBI on the morning of May 6, 2004 at his office in a Portland, Oregon suburb. He was arrested for his suspected involvement in the March 11, 2004 bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid, Spain that killed 191 people and injured over 2,000 others. 2 A federal judge signed the material witness warrant authorizing Mayfield’s arrest based on a supporting affidavit by FBI agent Richard K. Werder. The affidavit’s lynchpin was the allegation that senior FBI fingerprint examiner Terry Green identified “in excess of 15 points of identification during his comparison” of Mayfield’s prints on file with the Army and the FBI, and a “photograph image” of a print recovered from a plastic bag containing several detonators found in a stolen van near where three of the bombed trains departed. 3 The affidavit further alleges that the fingerprint identification was verified by an FBI fingerprint supervisor, and a retired FBI fingerprint examiner with 30 years of experience on contract with the lab’s Latent Fingerprint Section. 4 In addition the affidavit states: “… the FBI lab stands by their conclusion of a 100 percent positive identification.” 5 and, that after an April 21, 2004 meeting between agent Green and the Forensic Science Division of the Spanish National Police (SNP), “it was believed the SNP felt satisfied with the FBI laboratory’s identification [of Mayfield]…” 6

 

After Mayfield’s arrest, his wife Mona told reporters, “I think it’s crazy. We haven’t been outside the country for 10 years. They found only a part of one fingerprint. It could be anybody.” 7 Her words in defense of her husband were soon to prove prophetic.

 

Werder’s affidavit asserts Mayfield was initially targeted as a suspect in the bombing when his print was identified by FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) as one of several possible matches with one of the prints recovered from the plastic bag by the SNP. The affidavit further states FBI examiner Green then manually matched the print of the fourth AFIS match to the Madrid print as belonging to Mayfield, and then the other two examiners referred to in the affidavit verified that match.

 

Yet in spite of the certainty of the affidavit’s language tying Mayfield to the Spanish bombing, on May 24th the FBI suddenly reversed itself by acknowledging his print didn’t match one on the plastic bag, a federal judge dismissed the material witness warrant, and Mayfield was released from federal custody. 8

 

Brandon Mayfield in May 2004 after his release from being falsely imprisoned as an international terrorist.

 

Spanish National Police Knew Mayfield Was Innocent

 

That reversal wasn’t surprising to the SNP. That agency’s fingerprint analysts reported to the FBI on April 13th – 23 days before Mr. Mayfield’s arrest – that their comparison of his fingerprint with the one on the plastic bag was “conclusively negative.” 9 Corroborating that conclusion was the Spanish government had no record that Mayfield had ever traveled to that country.

 

The FBI discounted the SNP’s assessment to the degree that when the FBI lab’s Ted Green traveled to Spain in late April to meet with SNP officials to discuss the bureau’s identification of Mayfield, he didn’t bother to examine the original print on the bag. 10 However Spanish officials not only “refused to validate” the FBI’s identification of Mayfield, but they continued their investigation as if his prints weren’t on the bag. 11

 

So the SNP’s disagreement with the FBI’s Mayfield match was grossly misrepresented by the assertion in agent Werder’s affidavit, “…the SNP felt satisfied with the FBI laboratory’s identification.” 12 That disagreement became public knowledge when SNP officials announced on May 20th that they had linked two prints on the bag to an Algerian with a police record and a Spanish residency permit. 13 The next day a federal judge in Portland ordered Mayfield’s conditional release from custody and three days later the warrant against him was dismissed. 14 Seven days later, on May 31st, a Spanish high court judge issued an international arrest warrant for the Algerian charging him with 190 counts of murder. 15

 

After Mayfield’s exoneration on May 24th, the FBI claimed the error was caused by its crime lab’s reliance on a “substandard” image of the Madrid print. 16 However that claim was contradicted by former Scotland Yard fingerprint examiner Allan Bayle, an internationally recognized expert with more than a quarter century of experience who was retained by Mr. Mayfield’s public defenders. Mr. Bayle determined the clarity of the Madrid fingerprint photo is good, and that they are so dissimilar from Mayfield’s that they shouldn’t have been declared a match by a competent examiner. 17 He said of the FBI’s analysis, “It’s flawed on all levels,” and he described it as “horrendous.” 18

 

Federal prosecutors went beyond the FBI’s assertion that the image was “substandard” by claiming in a document related to his release, “Using the additional information acquired this weekend in Spain, the FBI lab has now determined that the latent print previously identified as a fingerprint of Mayfield to be of no value for identification purposes.” 19 However that statement is contradicted by both Mr. Bayle’s assessment and the SNP’s May 20th announcement of a suspect. So in trying to cover their tracks, both the FBI and federal prosecutors have issued suspect statements about the circumstances of why Mayfield was targeted.

 

Fingerprint Analysis Is A Pseudoscientific Art

 

Thus an obvious question is: How can fingerprint analysis be so unreliable that three FBI experts and an independent analyst could mistake the print of a mild mannered family man with an expired passport who has never been to Spain, for that of an international terrorist? The answer lies in understanding the foundation of fingerprint theory rests on three assumptions - two that are scientifically unproven and one that has been empirically disproven.

 

The first assumption - that fingerprints are unique – has been accepted on blind faith by courts in the U. S. since 1910. 20 Fingerprint uniqueness has not been scientifically proven, and it may be unprovable. It was noted e.g., in a 2001 book co-edited by renowned forensic scientist Henry C. Lee, “From a statistical viewpoint, the scientific foundation for fingerprint individuality is incredibly weak.” 21

 

The second assumption – that a person’s fingerprints have unique identifiers that can infallibly be measured - has likewise not been scientifically proven. Differing methods of identifying a person by their physical characteristics were developed during the 19th century. However no scientific basis established the accuracy of any of them. The British Home Office, e.g., rejected the use of fingerprints for identification purposes in 1894, because “there was no reason to resort to an unproven technology like fingerprints.” 22 Fingerprinting eventually enjoyed widespread adoption because they are easy to obtain, classify, catalog, retrieve and compare. Thus the adoption of fingerprint patterns as an identification method was driven by bureaucrats who embraced it as meeting their work requirements – and who had no concern for the scientifically unsubstantiated idea they can be measured to unfailingly identify a person. Expediency continues to be a justification for fingerprinting. Proponents argue that its common use for 100 years justifies continuing to do so.

 

The third assumption – that fingerprint examiners have the skill to infallibly determine if print samples from different sources originated from the same person – has been empirically disproven. The many people falsely implicated in a crime by an erroneous fingerprint ID is consistent with proficiency tests over the past several decades that have resulted in failure rates by experienced examiners of over 50%. That lack of expertise is predictable considering fingerprint analysis is an artful technique that depends on a human interpreter’s subjective evaluation. In 1892 Francis Galton, one of the fathers of fingerprinting, was honest enough to write, “A complex pattern [like fingerprints] is capable of suggesting various readings, as the figuring on a wallpaper may suggest a variety of forms and faces to those who have such fancies.” 23 One hundred and ten years later Scotland’s Justice Minister echoed Galton’s assessment by acknowledging fingerprinting “was not an exact science.” 24 That observation was in response to the August 2002 reversal of David Asbury’s murder conviction when fingerprint evidence used against him was discredited. The FBI is disingenuous by claiming fingerprinting is scientific, while acknowledging its lab’s dependence on subjective fingerprint examination techniques. The agency claims reliance on “human experience” and intuition rather than a rigorous process results in a more accurate analysis. 25 Yet the essence of the scientific process is the predictable independent duplicability of test results. 26 In Madrid as in Washington D.C., 2+2=4 and 6x7=42. However until the SNP went public with the disagreement over Mayfield’s print, the FBI insisted on the scientific impossibility that Mayfield’s fingerprint could be matched in the U.S. while not matching in Spain. The Mayfield’s case demonstrates what is to be expected of a subjective art, the conclusion of fingerprint examiners can and does markedly differ. Critics of fingerprinting are unaffected by the public’s erroneous perception that it is a science, and it is with good reason that for more than a century they have favorably compared it with pseudo-sciences such as tarot card reading, palmistry and graphology. 27

 

Since the three assumptions underlying fingerprinting are unproven or in error, the practice of comparing a suspect’s print with a crime scene (latent) print is vulnerable to honest and deliberate misinterpretation, and outright fakery. While a malevolent examiner can falsify evidence to implicate an innocent person in a heinous crime, an erroneous ID can be made by a conscientious examiner doing his job in the way he is trained. This has been borne out both in theory and practice by events on three continents during the last century.

 

 

 

A 100 Year Tradition of Fingerprint Fakery

 

In 1913 handwriting expert Theodore Kytka discovered a process of transferring an innocent person’s fingerprint to an incriminating object. 28 Prior to that, French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon faked “two different fingerprints which ostensibly showed sixteen matching points of similarity.” 29 Keep in mind that the FBI claimed to have matched “in excess of 15 points” of Mayfield’s print to the one on the plastic bag. In 1920 chirographer Milton Carlson demonstrated a technique for transferring a person’s fingerprint to an incriminating object if a photo of the person’s print was available. 30 Mr. Carlson wrote that it was easier to forge a person’s fingerprint than their handwriting, since “to complete a perfect forgery of a finger-print in the exact form is as easy to make as any steel ruler, surveyor’s tape, or a wheel within a wheel.” 31 In 1923, former Secret Service agent E.O. Brown developed a fingerprint forgery method so foolproof that he successfully planted a fake print of the Berkeley, California police chief at the scene of a burglary. 32 In 1924, Finger-Prints Can Be Forged was published, and co-author Albert Wehde, a photographer and engraver, explained how a crime scene (latent) print can be faked to implicate an innocent person in a crime. 33

 

Fingerprint examiners were so fearful of the danger to the practice posed by investigators and critics such as Wehde, that at the 1927 national meeting of the International Association for Identification (IAI), the Ethics Committee issued a recommendation, “that every possible effort should be made to checkmate these activities insofar as they may prejudice the public against latent fingerprints found at the scene of crime as competent evidence in a criminal trial…” 34

 

However such public relations efforts were needed not only to counteract publicity about the development of fingerprint forgery techniques, but to illuminate the fact that they were actively being used by police agencies to frame suspects. Two years prior to the IAI’s 1927 meeting, the FBI identified the forgery of an alleged crime scene fingerprint by a law enforcement officer. 35 Two years later, at the IAI’s national meeting in 1929, it was reported that law enforcement fingerprint forgery schemes had been uncovered in Kansas, New Mexico and Minnesota. 36 During the next 30 years the FBI exposed in a total of 13 states, an average of one police agency fingerprint forgery scheme every two years. 37

 

The most extensive known police agency forgery scheme was uncovered in 1992 when it was discovered that New York State Crime Lab personnel were forging fingerprint evidence. 38 The subsequent investigation found that at least five crime lab employees were involved in the forgery ring that faked fingerprint evidence in at least 40 cases, including homicide cases, over eight years. 39 Their forgery techniques included lifting a print from an inked fingerprint card on file and transferring it to crime scene evidence, and photocopying an inked print and labeling it as a latent crime scene print. 40

 

Two of the forgery ring’s five state police officers convicted of perjury, evidence tampering and official misconduct, were latent fingerprint examiners certified by the IAI. 41 The ring’s members admitted they manufactured fingerprint evidence because it was so easy to do, and get away with doing. Investigators wrote in the official report to New York’s governor, “In their confessions, the troopers themselves acknowledged that they chose to fabricate fingerprint evidence because they knew it would go unquestioned, because it was so thoroughly trusted.” 42 The forgery ring was able to operate for nearly a decade because there was no effective oversight of evidence processed by the crime lab or suspicion of a technician’s expert testimony, by lab supervisors, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, or news reporters. The report to the governor noted, “This indifference, in itself, strongly suggests that the individuals fabricating evidence on a routine basis had no fear of discovery and, except with a noted exception, apparently took few steps to cover their tracks.” 43

 

As common as fingerprint forgery is known to have occurred in the past, the falsification of fingerprint evidence has been exponentially eased by the computerization of fingerprint images by police agencies, including the FBI. In a November 2003 article, Wired magazine explored how easily a digitized image such as a photograph can be altered to be indistinguishable as a fake, using off the shelf software. 44 It is also known that the fingerprints in the FBI’s computer database are degraded in quality from a photograph of the same print, which contributes to the ease of falsifying a match. 45

 

Fingerprint Identification Is So Inexact That Honest Errors Occur

 

The ease with which fingerprint evidence can be deliberately falsified by crime lab personnel is compounded by what could be honest fingerprint identification errors. Possibly honest errors are known to have led to the conviction of a number of innocent people. 46 One of those was John Stoppelli, who was in New York where he lived, 3,000 miles from the scene of a crime in Oakland, California where his print was allegedly found. 47 Stoppelli was granted a pardon by President Truman after he had served two years of a six year sentence. 48 Another man, Roger Caldwell, was convicted of a double murder in Duluth, Minnesota based on fingerprint testimony linking him to the crime, when he was almost 1,000 miles away in Golden, Colorado. 49 In reversing his conviction in 1982 after he had been imprisoned for five years of a life sentence, the Minnesota Supreme Court stated, “The fingerprint expert’s testimony was damning – and it was false.” 50 The similarity Brandon Mayfield’s misidentification shares with those cases is he was far from where his alleged print was found. He was over 5,000 miles from Madrid at the time the FBI alleged he was handling the plastic bag.

 

In light of what has been learned in the intervening century, R. Austin’s Freeman’s 1907 detective novel – The Red Thumb Print – has proven to be prophetic. Its plot revolved around the perfect forgery of a thumb print found in blood at the scene of a crime, that if taken at face value would have sent an innocent man to prison. It is now known that Mr. Freeman’s story was a cautionary tale about ascribing too much value to seemingly incontestable fingerprint evidence.

 

The FBI Threw Caution To The Wind In Going After Mayfield

 

In Brandon Mayfield’s case the FBI threw caution to the wind. The degree to which the Bureau went to try to tag him as a participant in the Madrid bombings is indicated by the contentions in FBI agent Werder’s affidavit. To establish that Mayfield could have personally handled the bag in Madrid, the affidavit states, “Since no record of travel or travel documents have been found in the name of BRANDON BIERI MAYFIELD, it is believed that MAYFIELD may have traveled under a false or fictitious name, with false or fictitious documents.” 51 To infer Mayfield’s possible allegiance to militant Islamic groups such as the one suspected of masterminding the Madrid bombings, the affidavit alleges: that he had represented a Portland man in a child custody case who was later convicted of conspiring to help al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan; that he regularly attended a Mosque in the Portland area that was his place of worship; that he advertised his legal practice in a business publication described as a “Muslim yellow page directory”; and that one phone call in September 2002 was made from Mayfield’s home telephone to the phone of a man in Ashland, Oregon who at the time was the U.S. director of a Saudi Arabian based Islamic Foundation, that among other things “was involved in prison ministry throughout the United States, attempting to educate prisoners about the religion of Islam… This included distributing reading material to prisoners.” 52

 

Glaring by its omission, is any allegation in Werder’s affidavit that Mayfield had been observed or was otherwise known by anyone, whether a government agent or informant, of being involved in any illegal activity whatsoever, much less the four March 2004 bombings in Madrid, Spain. Quite to the contrary, the affidavit paints the picture of a devotedly religious family man, who as a sole practitioner lawyer represents people in civil cases such as child custody disputes and advertises his business to reach potential clients, and who may have talked once with a man involved in providing religious (Muslim) educational materials to prisoners in this country.

 

Mayfield Was Targeted Because He is a Muslim

 

If Mayfield had been a practicing Christian, or Jew, or some faith other than Muslim, then actions attributable to his belief in that religion set forth in an arrest/search warrant affidavit would not only have failed to provide ancillary support for his arrest, but would have highlighted the incongruity between his lifestyle and the FBI lab’s “conclusion of a 100 percent positive identification” his fingerprint matched the incriminatory one on the plastic bag in Spain. 53

 

Muslims are suspected of executing the Madrid bombing, so Brandon Mayfield’s Muslim religious beliefs, practices, and associations were necessarily included in FBI agent Werder’s affidavit to provide a tangible basis of support for the FBI’s allegation that he was involved. That may also explain why of the 20 people initially identified by the FBI’s computer program (AFIS) as possibly matching the Madrid print, Mayfield was the only one investigated. 54 The other 19 may have automatically been excluded as non-Muslims. Consistent with that is after Mayfield was arrested an FBI agent told him his Muslim friends wouldn’t be able to help him.

 

The importance of the affidavit’s emphasis on Mayfield’s religious affiliation is indicated by his lack of involvement in any criminal activity. This is supported by the assertion of Oregon’s United States Attorney Karin Immergut: “He was not on our radar screen in this district. His name was unknown to us.” 55

 

Brandon Mayfield’s arrest as a material witness depended on a federal judge being convinced by FBI agent Werder’s affidavit to sign the warrant. To be convincing, the affidavit relied on the reader’s predisposition to be prejudiced against Muslims. Hence the government proceeded on the assumption that the judge the warrant was presented to, in this case U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones, would share that prejudice and overlook the affidavit’s inconsistencies and insubstantiality.

 

After his release, Mayfield expressed his opinion that his religious orientation was why the FBI selected him, “I believe I was singled out and discriminated against, I feel, as a Muslim.” 56 The FBI, however, couldn’t have done anything without willingly being backed up by federal prosecutors and federal Judge Jones.

 

Federal Judge Robert Jones Failed To Perform His Constitutional Gatekeeper Responsibility

 

Thus while it is easy to blame the FBI and the US Attorneys Office in Portland for proceeding without caution – Judge Jones must shoulder ultimate responsibility for failing to perform his constitutional gatekeeper function to shield the rights of an American from over-zealous government agencies and employees. After all, the affidavit states, “MAYFIELD’s passport expired on October 20, 2003 and he is not on record for renewal.” 57 It additionally states, “Checks through the National Tracking System going back one year do not show any airline travel or border crossings by BRANDON MAYFIELD…” 58 The affidavit then surmised that since there was no record of his international travel, “it is believed that MAYFIELD may have traveled under a false or fictitious name, with false or fictitious documents.” 59 However a number of obvious facts undermine that supposition. The FBI’s intense seven week investigation of Mayfield from March 21st to May 6th didn’t uncover any proof of any kind he had traveled out of the country at any time during the previous several months, or that his whereabouts were unaccounted for during any several day period of time it would have taken him to stealthily travel to Spain, participate in the bombing’s execution, and then return to the U.S. without a single client, associate, friend or family member noticing his prolonged and unusual absence.

 

The affidavit’s attempt to paint Mayfield as guilty by portraying unremarkable actions and associations related to his Muslim faith as sinister, coupled with its attempt to gloss over the lack of any evidence he had ever traveled to Spain, combined with the concealment that the SNP’s comparison of his print to the one on the plastic bag was “conclusively negative,” points directly to the FBI’s deliberate attempt to frame Brandon Mayfield as involved in the Madrid bombing. The apparent purpose of FBI agent

 

Werder’s affidavit wasn’t to set out a series of facts demonstrating Mayfield’s terrorist involvement, but to fool the gullible into believing it could be true when there wasn’t any actual evidence supporting the allegation.

 

The evidence in the public domain indicates that Judge Jones didn’t seriously question the affidavit’s inconsistencies from May 6th when federal prosecutors requested he authorize Mayfield’s arrest, to May 24th when he ordered Mayfield’s release from federal custody. So the most charitable description of Judge Jones’ actions is he allowed himself to be duped into rubber stamping the government's request to have Mayfield arrested, when a cursory examination of the affidavit offered to justify Mayfield’s arrest as a material witness would have revealed significant, if not fatal flaws undermining the allegation he was an international terrorist. Although it fell on deaf ears, Mayfield had plainly spoken the truth at his first court hearing when he told Judge Jones, “That’s not my fingerprint, your honor” 60

 

Mayfield Was Saved By The Spanish National Police

 

With a compliant federal judge giving a free hand to the FBI and federal prosecutors, it was sheer luck that Brandon Mayfield was saved from possible prosecution for a capital crime by the Spanish National Police crime lab’s independent analysis of his print. He was also fortunate that the SNP refused to cave into the FBI’s intense pressure to back up their identification of Mayfield. Carlos Corrales, commissioner of the SNP’s science division, said the FBI “called us constantly. They kept pressing us.” 61 Mr. Corrales was perplexed by the FBI’s desire to pin the bombing on Mayfield, saying “It seemed as though they had something against him, and they wanted to involve us.” 62 It was also fortuitous for Mayfield that the SNP’s exclusion of him as a suspect attracted international media attention that U.S. officials couldn’t conveniently sweep under the rug.

 

As Mayfield’s attorney, federal public defender Steven Wax commented, “But for the unusual circumstance of another national police agency conducting its own independent investigation, Mr. Mayfield would still be incarcerated.” 63 Mayfield’s other attorney, federal defender Chris Schatz, openly wondered how many people didn’t have a White Knight to save them from a police crime lab’s false fingerprint ID, “Who knows how many people are sitting in state and federal prisons that have just never come to light because there is no independent agency like the Spanish National Police.” 64

 

The answer to “how many” people have not been as lucky as Brandon Mayfield is unknown. However it is known that many innocent people have been victimized by a fingerprint misidentification during the past century, and that a number of inescapable human and scientific reasons underlie such errors. So prudence and a sense of fair play dictates the fingerprint ID of every suspect should receive the same intensity of independent scrutiny that prevented Brandon Mayfield’s possible wrongful conviction as a terrorist.

 

The day of his release, Brandon Mayfield shared what he believed was the meaning of his experience for all Americans, “You can’t trade your freedom for security. Because if you do, you’re going to lose both.” 65

 

 

Endnotes:

1 Transcripts Detail Objections, Early Signs of Flaws, Les Zaitz, The Oregonian, May 26, 2004.

2 FBI Admits Fingerprint Error, Clearing Portland Attorney, David Heath and Hal Bernton (staff), Seattle Times, May 25, 2004.

3 Affidavit of Rickard K. Werder, May 6, 2004, In Re: Federal Grand Jury 03-01, No. 04-MC-9071 (USDC WD OR), ¶ 7.

4 Id. at ¶ 7.

5 Id. at ¶ 8.

6 Id at ¶ 8.

7 US Lawyer Held Over Madrid Bomb Link, Alec Russell, The Telegraph, London, UK, May 8, 2004.

8 FBI Admits Fingerprint Error, supra.

9 Spain and U.S. at Odds on Mistaken Terror Arrest, Sarah Kershaw (staff), New York Times, National Section, June 5, 2004. (Spain continued to insist Mayfield’s prints were a negative match, and three weeks before Mayfield’s arrest expressed “serious doubts” to the FBI that his prints matched those on the bag, Spanish Investigators Question Fingerprint Analysis, KATU 2 News, Portland, OR, May 8, 2004.)

10 Spain and U.S. at Odds on Mistaken Terror Arrest, supra.

11 Id.

12 Affidavit of Rickard K. Werder, supra at ¶ 8.

13 Spanish Investigators Question Fingerprint Analysis, supra.

14 FBI Admits Fingerprint Error, supra.

15 Madrid Bombing Warrant, New York Times, International Europe section, June 1, 2004.

16 FBI’s Handling of Fingerprint Case Criticized, David Heath (staff), Seattle Times, June 1, 2004.

17 Id.

18 Id.

19 FBI Apologizes to Mayfield, Noelle Crombie and Les Zaitz (staff), The Oregonian, May 25, 2004.

20 Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, Simon A. Cole, Harvard University Press, 2001, at 177-180. (Discusses the 1910 Jennings case in Illinois. It was the first case in this country in which a conviction dependent on fingerprint testimony tying a defendant to a crime was upheld, and Mr. Jennings was subsequently hanged.)

21 Advances in Fingerprint Technology, Second Edition, Ed. By Henry C. Lee and R.E. Gaensslen, CRC Press, 2001, p. 383. (emphasis added).

22 Suspect Identities, supra at 81.

23 Finger Prints, Francis Galton, London, Macmillan and Co., 1892, pp. 65-66.

24 Wallace Defends Fingerprint Remark, BBC News, September 18, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/2265693.stm (last visited June 6, 2004).

25 Spain and U.S. at Odds on Mistaken Terror Arrest, supra.

26 See e.g., Scientific Methods, McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, 1997, Vol. 16, p.119-120 (Among the requirements of the scientific method are: “testable consequences;” “repetition of the test;” and “reliability and accuracy.”).

27 Suspect Identities, supra at 202-203 (“pseudo-science”).

28 Id. at 275.

29 Id. at 201.

30 Id. at 275.

31 Id. at 275.

32 Id. at 275.

33 Id. at 188, 276-278.

34 Id. at 277-278.

35 Id. at 278.

36 Id. at 278.

37 Id. at 278-279.

38 Id. at 274.

39 Id. at 274-280.

40 Id., quote at 280.

41 Id. at 274.

42 Id., quote at 280.

43 Id., quote at 279-280.

44 These Are Definitely Not Scully’s Breasts: Inside One Man’s Crusade To Save Gillian Anderson and the rest of the world from the plague of fake celebrity porn, by David Kushner, Wired Magazine, November 2003, pp. 142-145.

45 This degradation occurs from a combination of the scanning process used to digitize them and the 12.9 to 1 compression ratio used when they are convert into the WSQ file format used by the FBI to store fingerprints in its database.

46 See e.g., The Innocents Database, http://forejustice.org/search_idb.htm, which lists a number of people whose wrongful conviction was contributed to by an erroneous fingerprint ID.

47 Never Plead Guilty: The Story of Jake Ehrlich, John Wesley Noble and Bernard Averbuch, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, N.Y., 1955, pp. 295-298.

48 Id. at 295-298.

49 Minnesota v Roger Sipe Caldwell, Nos. 49437, 51505, Supreme Court of Minnesota, 322 N.W. 2d 574, 1982.MN.268, ¶¶ 54-5 <http://www.versuslaw.com>.

50 Id. ¶ 75.

51 Affidavit of Rickard K. Werder, supra at ¶ 23. (See also, Spain Bombing Glance, Associated Press, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 24, 2004.)

52 Id. at ¶¶ 13, 16, 18, 19 and 20. (See also, Spain Bombing Glance, supra).

53 Id. at ¶ 8.

53 FBI Case Oregon Lawyer, Les Zaitz, The Oregonian, May 30, 2004 (The FBI’s AFIS returned 20 possible matches).

54 FBI Case Oregon Lawyer, supra.

55 FBI Case Oregon Lawyer, supra.

56 Madrid Bombings Case Thrown Out Aaisnt Oregon Attorney, CNN.com, May 25, 2004. http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/05/24/spain.bombings.lawyer.ap/

57 Affidavit of Rickard K. Werder, supra at ¶ 21.

58 Id. at ¶ 21.

59 Id. at ¶ 23.

60 Transcripts Detail Objections, Early Signs of Flaws, Les Zaitz, The Oregonian, May 26, 2004.

61 Spain and U.S. at Odds on Mistaken Terror Arrest, supra.

62 Id.

63 FBI Apologizes to Mayfield, supra.

64 Brandon Mayfield Opens Investigations Into His Arrest, Andrew Kramer (staff), KATU 2 News, Portland, OR, May 25, 2004.

65 ‘Sneak and peek’ searches dogged family, Joseph Rose (staff), The Oregonian, May 25, 2004. Mayfield’s comment is reminiscent of an observation credited to Benjamin Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”