Bonds Pleads Not Guilty

[Flip217]

Greeted by "a throng of fans" at the courthouse.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/baseball/mlb/wires/12/08/2010.ap.bbo.bonds.perjury.0914/

I swear, I could see a San Fran jury letting him off.

[Migrant Redbird]

Given a high priced legal team and a hand-picked jury pool, I could easily see him getting off, although the evidence against him for perjury appears overwhelming.

The indictment charges Bonds with lying when he testified he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs, even though prosecutors say he flunked a private steroids test in 2000. Bonds' personal surgeon, Dr. Arthur Ting, collected the blood sample and is expected to be called as a witness if the case goes to trial.

.... Bonds' new defense team, assembled in the days leading up to his first court appearance, is expected to attack the credibility some of the government's key witnesses, including Bonds' former mistress and a one-time business partner who had a bitter split with the slugger over memorabilia sales.

Legal experts also say the reliability of the drug test, seized during a raid of the BALCO steroids lab, will be subject to fierce scrutiny by Bonds' lawyers.

The fact that Bonds voluntarily submitted to the drug test (and presumably several others) should trump any possible questions which could be raised regarding the reliability of the test itself. I can't imagine any rational explanation for Bonds taking the tests, aside from wanting to know whether he could pass MLB's testing. But all the defense team needs to do is to get one juror on the panel who's more stubborn than the other eleven and holds out for acquittal.

[giantfan]

Given a high priced legal team and a hand-picked jury pool, I could easily see him getting off, although the evidence against him for perjury appears overwhelming.

The fact that Bonds voluntarily submitted to the drug test (and presumably several others) should trump any possible questions which could be raised regarding the reliability of the test itself. I can't imagine any rational explanation for Bonds taking the tests, aside from wanting to know whether he could pass MLB's testing. But all the defense team needs to do is to get one juror on the panel who's more stubborn than the other eleven and holds out for acquittal.

The timing doesnt make really sense, testing didnt start until 2003 so whys hes taking tests in 2000?

Either way the tests will be hard to put in court since there was nobody to verify it came from him and balco didnt keep strict records of their tests. For the mlb testing policy players have to take off their shirts and pants and give the urine sample to the urine dude in front of him. Unless theres somebody out their who saw bonds pee in that cup it probably wont even make it to trial. Perjury is very difficult to prove, the main witnesses arnt exactly a prosecutors dream.

[Migrant Redbird]

The timing doesnt make really sense, testing didnt start until 2003 so whys hes taking tests in 2000?

Testing had been going on for years in amateur athletics and baseball had been discussing it forever. There was always the possibility that MLB and the Players Association would come to an agreement implementing testing BALCO was simply applying the same procedures with Bonds that they did with Olympic athletes like Marian Smith.

Either way the tests will be hard to put in court since there was nobody to verify it came from him and balco didnt keep strict records of their tests. For the mlb testing policy players have to take off their shirts and pants and give the urine sample to the urine dude in front of him. Unless theres somebody out their who saw bonds pee in that cup it probably wont even make it to trial.

That's not necessarily true. A test which Bonds took voluntarily that was administered by a private lab is not going to be held to the same strict standards of positive control that are applied to the MLB tests. It's kind of analogous to the situation which might occur if the police searched your car or your home and found illegal drugs. Once the police confiscate the materials, they will institute strict positive control of the evidence, but the fact that no similar level of control was maintained over the evidence prior to its discovery by police isn't going to get you acquitted. Your lawyer may argue that a passenger in your vehicle or a visitor to your house left those drugs there until he's blue in the face and it probably won't get you off unless you can provide some kind of evidence beyond the lack of control.

His lawyers are going to be arguing that the test doesn't have the same level of assurance as an MLB test, which is true, but the prosecutor will point out that just the fact that Bonds was taking a series of tests (I'm assuming that there were more than one, but that BALCO's protocols prevented him from showing up positive on the others) is pretty strong evidence that he was using steroids and trying to find out whether the BALCO masking agents and protocols were successful or not.

Perjury is very difficult to prove, the main witnesses arnt exactly a prosecutors dream.

In this case, they might be.

You have Barry's personal physician who collected the specimens and presumably knew what they were for, given that he sent them to the test lab used by BALCO rather than the lab he would have used for standard medical tests.

You have the lab personnel themselves who, while a little shady, presumably had somewhat rigorous standards for positive control of samples to ensure that they didn't mix up the results between athletes. Since they were attempting to spot any drugs which might have been detected by the labs used by the Olympic committee, their procedures were probably state-of-the-art and at least comparable to those used currently by the MLB testing labs.

While Conte and Anderson might be refusing to testify, the records that they kept will be eloquent in their stead. Recall that the betting slips which MLB detectives recovered didn't explicitly identify Pete Rose, but I'd be willing to bet that a lot of illegal bookies have gone up the river because of similar evidence, substantiated by other circumstantial evidence and the testimony of police informers.

In this case, I suspect Barry's lawyers are going to have a difficult case to make when they argue that Barry didn't commit perjury because he wasn't using steroids or because he didn't know that he was using them. That's all that the prosecutor has to show, that Bonds was engaged in using PEDs prior to his grand jury testimony. Very few jurors are going to buy his contention that he didn't know what was in the stuff, especially when he voluntarily took drug tests to see if he would test clean. Barry might be "dumber than dirt", but it won't be easy to prove in court that he was duped into going through all of that.