Since I've started writing about Shannon's case, several people have approached me with the same question. They admit that the evidence I've presented is compelling. They agree that it's obvious that in one manner or another, Shannon's case was botched. What they can't understand is why the FBI would railroad a man they don't know. Why would they falsify evidence to put an innocent man behind bars? Why would they go to so much trouble to frame someone when they could just spend their time looking for the real killer? I don't have an answer for them. I don't know why. But I do know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they do it. They did it before Shannon's case, and they've done it after. The evidence is out there, and it's easy to find. One has to look no further than the case of Brandon Mayfield.

Jury selection for Shannon's Beaumont trial began in June of 2004. Barely a month before, Brandon Mayfield, an attorney from Oregon, was arrested and jailed in connection with a terrorist bombing in Madrid, Spain. In March of that year, ten explosions on four separate commuter trains killed 191 people. The evidence that purportedly tied Mr. Mayfield to the scene of the crime was a fingerprint found on a plastic bag used by the terrorists.

In media reports, US officials insisted that the fingerprint, which had been analyzed by the FBI, was an "absolutely incontrovertible match." The other evidence against Mayfield--cited in a report written by law-enforcement--was that he was a practicing Muslim, was currently engaged in a child custody battle, and his wife had contributed money to a Muslim charity that was under investigation for possibly providing funding to terrorist groups. I bring up this case because the "evidence" against Brandon Mayfield relied on--just as it did with Shannon's--a questionable fingerprint match and little else.

Fortunately for Mayfield, Spanish law enforcement immediately began to express serious concerns over the quality of the FBI's fingerprint match--despite the Bureau's confidence and repeated insistence that the match had been verified by multiple experts. Spanish authorities communicated that they had several more promising leads, including a group of Moroccan immigrants with no ties to the US. The FBI ignored the information and began to spy on Mayfield and his family. According to court documents, the Bureau wiretapped the Mayfields' phones, bugged their house, and searched the premises multiple times. Only when Spanish officials were able to conclusively identify another suspect--an Algerian man with demonstrable ties to terrorist organizations--did FBI examiners agree to travel to Spain. Once they arrived, they soon realized that the latent print on the plastic bag was a much closer match to the Algerian man's print than it was to Mayfield's.

After thorough examination, we can attribute this grave mistake to two factors. First, there admittedly had been a significant number of points of similarity between the latent print and Mayfield's print. While it's true that every individual fingerprint is unique, many are actually quite similar in pattern. That is why it's so important to do a thorough and varied print analysis before confirming a match. Second, the quality of the electronic copy of the print that the FBI was using for comparison lacked the clarity of the print in its original form.

This case is very similar to Shannon's in several key ways. Agent Davey testified at trial that he had found seven points of comparison between the photos of the duct tape prints and Shannon's print. The latent print from the Madrid crime scene and Mayfield's print had more points of similarity--and still proved to be a negative match. In Shannon's case, just as in Mayfield's case, the FBI said multiple Bureau "experts" had confirmed the match--which we know now doesn't confer infallibility one bit. Finally, in both cases we clearly see that a reproduction of a print is not a clear and precise copy of an original, and should not be used to declare a positive match.

Two weeks after Mayfield's arrest, he was released. The FBI issued a formal apology, explaining that because of this grave error they would review their "current practices and will give consideration to adopting new guidelines for all examiners receiving latent print images when the original evidence is not included." Whether the FBI has actually done this with any degree of success remains to be seen. In the eventual court case brought by the Mayfields against the government, Judge Ann Aiken found that the fingerprint match that had been "conclusively" verified had in fact been completely "fabricated and concocted by the FBI and DOJ."

Dr. Kenneth Eng is a certified print examiner with over 25 years of experience. Over the course of 22 years as Detective Investigator in the Latent Print Unit of the NYPD, he has conducted over 800,000 inked and latent print comparisons. Dr. Eng is of the opinion that the FBI treated the forensic investigation of Shannon's case similarly to the way they handled Mayfield's. You may recall from Part 3 that the FBI destroyed the original latent prints on the duct tape with gentian violet, while trying to find possible underlying prints. Thus, the FBI examiners were not using the originals during the conduction of their investigation. Worse, neither the FBI or the independent examiners will ever have access to the original prints--unlike in Mayfield's case.

After the public embarrassment of misidentifying an innocent man as a terrorist, the FBI and their reports were placed under review by the Office of the Inspector General. The OIG found that the Bureau had engaged in an unreliable technique referred to as "reasoning backwards." In other words, instead of first identifying points on the latent prints that could serve as usable comparison points, the examiners found such points on Mayfield's prints and then looked for corresponding points on the latent set. The OIG found that in multiple incidences, the characteristics "found" by the FBI examiners did not really exist but were merely suggested by unclear and indistinct markings on the photos of the latent print sets.

The same could be said, in Dr. Eng's opinion, of Shannon's case. Dr. Eng disagrees with Agent Davey's assessment that the latent prints from the duct tape can be individualized to Shannon. In Mr. Eng's judgement, none of the latent print photographs match the inked prints of Shannon Agofsky. Not only did Dr. Eng fail to find a sufficient number of points of similarity, but he was also unable to find some of the points of similarity identified and highlighted by Agent Davey at trial. Dr. Eng believes that Davey's analysis is seriously flawed.

In reaching this opinion, Dr. Eng notes two particularly important points. First, each of the photos of the latent prints used by the Bureau during their examination were of partial--not full--prints. At trial, Davey even acknowledged this, admitting that several of the prints were very small and yielded relatively few points of similarity. Additionally, large sections of the original prints were smudged and otherwise obscured--and the photos rendered the prints even more difficult to discern. It was therefore impossible to tell whether these smudged areas contained unexplainable points of dissimilarity which may have excluded Shannon as a suspect.

As previously stated, Dr. Eng was unable to distinguish print characteristics and details that Davey had identified. Dr. Eng explained that a problem that sometimes occurs during examination is when examiners will identify details in the known inked print and then "find" those same details in the latent print because they are already "mentally primed" to see them. Mr. Eng believes this may have occurred with Shannon's case as it did in Brandon Mayfield's, but that is only his personal opinion. He does say with certainty, however, that he himself is unable to find the points of similarity identified by Davey and does not agree with his conclusion that the latent prints match Shannon's.

These are critical points, rendered even more important by the Bureau's Mayfield debacle. In my opinion, Shannon's counsel should have drawn parallels between the FBI's handling of evidence in the Short case and its handling of the Mayfield case. They should have pointed out the fact that the FBI misidentified Mayfield's print and continued to investigate his family even after they were advised that they had the wrong man. Shannon's defense absolutely should have raised the point that because the FBI destroyed the original prints from the murder scene, Shannon might never be able to prove that mistakes were made in their comparisons due to the obvious flaws in the protocols employed. Shannon's defense should have made it glaringly obvious that the FBI picked a suspect they liked for the crime and concocted the evidence to match. It wasn't the first time they had done it. It certainly wasn't the last.

I can't tell you why they did it. It's something I've agonized over more times than I'll admit. I've asked Shannon what he thinks, and he is as clueless as I am. He was from a poor, blue-collar family. Some of his family had been in trouble with the law; some of them hadn't. He himself had never been in serious trouble, and had never dabbled in drugs or alcohol. He can't come up with a single reason why they FBI targeted him and his brother. But they did, just as they did Brandon Mayfield. But Brandon Mayfield walked away with a cleared name, a formal apology, and over two million dollars. Shannon, meanwhile, sits in a maximum security cell--just another victim of the FBI's legacy of lies.

If you have any questions or comments concerning Shannon's case, or think you may be able to help his cause, please contact me at theblackswanbooks@outlook.com