"Radical" Gerry Spence grandstands on the Patriot Act

Watch this video where "radical" attorney Gerry Spence uses his recent victory in the Brandon Mayfield case to grandstand on the Patriot Act.

Recall that Brandon Mayfield was the Portland, Oregon attorney whose fingerprints the FBI believed were on a detonator package used in the March 11, 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid, Spain. Mayfield was arrested on May 6, 2004 as a material witness and then released two weeks later when the FBI realized that its fingerprint analysis was in error.

Though Spence would have the audience believe that it was the "unconstitutional" (as he says) Patriot Act that led to Mayfield's mistaken arrest, the reality is that he was detained as a material witness under another legal statute. A Department of Justice investigation into the case concluded that "contrary to public speculation after Mayfield's arrest, the FBI did not use certain provisions of the Patriot Act in the Mayfield case."

What the Patriot Act did make possible was the sharing of information between the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

Recall that prior to the Patriot Act, the FBI and CIA were prevented from sharing information that some have suggested might have enabled authorities to intercept the 9/11 attacks at the planning stage.

Spence seems to think that Americans are prone to believing that the FBI is "infallible." He casts the apology his client received from the FBI as a first-time-ever victory though in fact, there are many cases in which the FBI has had to ap0logize.

Apologizing in the Mayfield case must have been far easier for the FBI than the apology it had to issue in another recent case of mistaken fingerprints. In 2005, the FBI had to apologize for failing to identify the fingerprints of one Jeremy B. Jones, a mistake that freed Jones and enabled him to go on to murder three women and a young girl.

Mayfield obtained a settlement from the U.S. government of $2 million for having endured two weeks of detention where he was neither tortured nor even mistreated. I wonder what the families of the murdered women and girls got from the U.S. government in the Jones case. That they got nothing doesn't seem exactly fair, does it?

And while I'm asking this type of indelicate question, what do you suppose Spence's take was in the Mayfield settlement? I wonder if Spence would care to share that information.