Boldly asserting an American citizen's right not to be spied on illegally by the Government, Brandon Mayfield a 37 year old lawyer from Beaverton Oregon with the help of the A.C.L.U. are suing the Federal Government to have the sections of the Patriot Act expanding the Government's powers to spy on it's citizens ruled unconstitutional. Brandon Mayfield (a Muslim) was mistakenly linked to the 2004 train bombings in Madrid Spain, and aggressively and illegaly investigated and jailed as a suspect.
"This lawsuit seeks to affirm that not even a 'War on Terror' allows the federal government to deprive U.S. citizens of their constitutionally protected rights to liberty and to enjoy the privacy and security of their homes and office," the suit claims.
Mayfields' suit will challenge legality of USA Patriot Act
The Mayfield case gets around the Supreme Court's standing test, used until now as a Catch 22 to throw out cases challenging the Patriot Act's radical expansion the government powers to spy on citizens without judicial review.
This comes on the heels of Thursday's Federal Court ruling that the Patriot Act lacks the judicial review necessary to be constitutional when conducting the "far-reaching invasions of liberty" under the Patriot Act.
Late last year the federal government agreed to settle Mayfield's suit for being wrongly jailed for 2 million dollars.
...Despite doubts from Spanish officials about the validity of the fingerprint match, American officials began an aggressive high-level investigation into Mr. Mayfield in the weeks after the bombings. The fact that he had represented a terrorism defendant in a child-custody case in Portland spurred further interest in him. Using expanded surveillance powers under the USA Patriot Act, the government wiretapped his conversations, conducted secret searches of his home and his law office and jailed him for two weeks as a material witness in the case before a judge threw out the case against him.
The settlement includes an unusual condition that frees the government from future liability except in one important area: Mr. Mayfield is allowed to continue a lawsuit seeking to overturn parts of the Patriot Act as a violation of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure...
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Will this novel legal theory that the government's power to spy on it's citizens is limited by the Constitution stand a snowball's chance in Hell before the judges on the Roberts Court who tend to favor unlimited power for the President?
We shall see.