U.S. Misuses Material Witness Law
The Bush administration has misused a federal law to detain at least 70 terrorism suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks, two advocacy groups contend.
Administration officials defend the detentions by pointing out that judges approved material witness warrants.
The material witness law, enacted in 1984, allows the arrest and detention of witnesses who might flee before testifying in criminal cases.
Only 28 of the suspects were eventually charged with a crime, according to the
American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, and most of those charges were not related to terrorism.
... The government has apologized to 13 people for their detention under the law. One in that group is Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield. The
FBI arrested Mayfield in connection with the train bombings in Madrid, Spain, in 2004 after wrongly matching his fingerprint to one found on a shopping bag in Spain.
Twenty-three people were held two months or more without being charged, the report said.
"They threw witnesses in a black hole where they didn't have access to the basis for their arrest, weren't provided with lawyers, weren't allowed to talk to family members and were held in complete secrecy with no concrete end to their detention," said Anjana Malhotra, the report's author.
The Justice Department has refused to say how often it has used the law in terrorism investigations.
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