[lbo-talk] Brandon Mayfield

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Justin wrote:

>And you [Nathan Newman] also know that the indictment and criminal 
>prosecution of lawyers who defend politically unpopular clients (it 
>doesn't matter whether they are despicable or not) is not going to 
>deter the nonexistent malfeasance of lawyers who  conspire with 
>terrorists, because there aren't any.

In addition to the case of <a 
href="http://www.lynnestewart.org/">Lynne Stewart,</a> there is 
another recent case of attack on lawyers who defend unpopular clients 
-- the case of Brandon Mayfield:

"The man was identified as Brandon Mayfield, a convert to Islam who 
is tangentially linked to one of the chief defendants in the 
so-called 'Portland Seven' case-a suspected terror cell in Oregon 
whose six surviving members pled guilty last year of plotting to 
fight for the Taliban against U.S. soldiers during the war in 
Afghanistan" (Michael Isikoff, "An American Connection?" 
<em>Newsweek,</em> <a 
href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4918333/site/newsweek/">May 6, 
2004</a>).

<blockquote>He's been home for more than a week now, back with his 
wife and kids and grateful to be putting his life back together. But 
Brandon Mayfield, the Portland, Ore., lawyer who was wrongly jailed 
for 14 days as a "material witness" in the deadly Madrid bombings, is 
still mad as hell. Mad at the FBI, for insisting his fingerprint had 
been found on a plastic bag used by the terrorists-even though 
Mayfield hadn't traveled abroad in a decade and the Spanish 
authorities doubted the print match. Madder still at the Justice 
Department, for using the material-witness law to round him up on 
flimsy evidence and then bolstering the shaky case against him by 
painting him as a Muslim extremist. (<strong>The affidavit that 
helped secure his arrest made much of the fact that he had converted 
to Islam, is married to an Egyptian-born woman and had once briefly 
represented a member of the "Portland Seven" in a child-custody 
case.</strong>) "Even though I was arrested as a material witness, 
don't be confused," Mayfield told NEWSWEEK in a phone interview 
Friday. "They were telling the judge and the world that they've got a 
fingerprint that's a 100 percent match ... What are the implications 
of that, legally? It's a death sentence."  (Andrew Murr, "The Wrong 
Man," <em>Newsweek,<em> <a 
href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5092810/site/newsweek/">June 7, 
2004</a>)</blockquote>

I'm sure there will be other attacks on lawyers (or there may already 
have been others that I have not heard about) in the endless "war on 
terrorism."
-- 
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: 
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, 
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>