Daniel_Newby

Indeed. That's why he was also protected by the FBI internal reviews that freed him, the prosecutors who know just how silly a bad fingerprint match will look in court, the compulsory defense lawyer and defense investigation budget, the judge with whom the admissibility of evidence is negotiated before trial, the trial judge, the more or less fairly selected jurors, the observers and free press in the trial courtroom, the appellate.

Please, please, stop wallowing in this idiotic paranoia or persecution fantasy or whatever it is. This guy looked suspicious as hell during a period of raving government paranoia, in a case involving a public safety emergency, and got interviewed for two weeks.

Yes, that is scary and obnoxious for him, but what more do you want? Investigate mad bombers slowly, carefully, like a stolen car case? Invest $500 billion to raise the false positive rate to one in 10 billion?

The article claims they deduced he was an international spy. But the article is a political hatchet job. It is entirely likely that "we put a lot of effort into investigating how he could have traveled" was ninja translated to "we knew he was flying under false papers".

His awareness was not used as evidence of guilt, silly. Not even that idiotic article said that. It was used as evidence that he was a flight risk.

Excellent means that they went from a tiny sliver of evidence to someone who raised pretty much every red flag there is.

And the excellent response was ... investigate harder. They did not drag him into a jail and torture a confession out of him, Japanese style. They did not torture him and his wife for anything they could get, Russian style. They did not disappear his entire family and business partners, Columbian style.

While waiting for the next few hundred people to be blown up, they ... investigated quietly. When the whole thing fell apart, they sent in a team of trained assassins to, well, actually there were no assassins or torture chambers, just a couple weeks in Club Fed as a material wotness. You know, like all the other witnesses locked up for a few days when they are trying to sort out who is the deranged killer and who can be safely released.

> That's not very good, and that's horrifying as that could literally happen to any of us by nothing more than some bad luck.

Try reading my comment again, you fucking dumbass. EVERY DETECTION METHOD HAS A FALSE POSITIVE RATE, AND THE FBI'S FOR COUNTERTERRORISM APPEARS TO BE ABOUT 0.5 PER YEAR.

It could not "literally happen to any of us with a little bad luck". You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be struck by lightning. More people have won $100,000,000 in a lottery than have been held in non-criminal custody by the FBI due to investigation mistakes.

That's an error rate so low it would make jetliner engineers faint with envy. (You are orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by such an engineer than inconvenienced for a few days by the FBI.)

Stop regurgutating that idiotic political spew. Start thinking for yourself or shut the fuck up.

The FBI has no jurisdiction. Courts have jurisdiction.

A single partial fingerprint would have been laughed out of the prosecutor's office. If the prosecutor was idiotic or careless, the judge would have thrown it out. If by some reverse miracle the judge had believed it, the jury, defense lawyer, and expert witnesses would have stopped it.

There are dozens of layers of reviews and protections, not the ignorant "FBI has sole jurisdiction" theory you are spouting.

Honestly, have you never in you life watched a single episode of a police procedural TV show? Even an episode of Cops?

There is also the matter of the DNA that goes along with every fingerprint, which would have definitively exonerated the suspect.

The FBI was simply doing their job: vacuum up as much information as possible and look for patterns. Their only legal obligation to the suspect is to get search warrants before searching and not torture him. Period. Cops incriminate, the rest of the system sorts it out.

You want an investigator that analyzes the value of evidence and lays criminal charges too, you convene a grand jury. But not the FBI, not cops of any kind.