It appears as though 37 year-old lawyer Brandon Mayfield wasn’t tied to the Madrid bombings afterall, and the FBI is apologizing for incorrectly identifying a fingerprint as belonging to him.
This is a rather large screw-up, and Mayfield deserves some considerable recompense from the FBI for this – certainly more than an apology and a ticket home. The FBI seems to have a thing for misidentifying people – Richard Jewell, Stephen Hatfield, and now Brandon Mayfield. The concept of a domestic counterterrorism unit along the lines of the UK’s MI5 is starting to sound like a better and better idea…
As always, Glenn Reynolds has several informative links on the problems with fingerprint identification as well.
