After Final Entreaties, Jury Gets Bonds Case
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
Barry Bonds arriving at federal court before lawyers gave their closing arguments in his perjury trial.
By JULIET MACUR
Published: April 7, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO — Federal prosecutors gave one final appeal to jurors in Barry Bonds’s perjury case Thursday, asking for them to find Bonds guilty and emphasizing how simple it would have been for him to avoid this trial.
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“All he had to do was tell the truth,” Assistant United States Attorney Jeffrey Nedrow said to start the government’s closing argument. “He chose not to tell the truth, and that’s why we’re here.”
Bonds, the former San Francisco Giants star, is charged with three counts of lying to a grand jury in 2003 when he testified that he never knowingly took steroids or that he was never injected by someone other than his personal doctor. He is also charged with one count of obstruction of justice in connection with the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative steroids investigation.
Each count carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence, though federal guidelines call for a sentence of 15 to 21 months. If convicted, Bonds — who was indicted more than three years ago — will probably receive a much lighter punishment.
The jury of eight women and four men listened to more than four hours of closing arguments before leaving to deliberate. But the panel decided to return Friday morning. It had been given the task of coming to a unanimous decision on each count.
Even one conviction could taint Bonds’s career even more than the rumors of his steroid use already have, and could further jeopardize his entry into the Hall of Fame. But the government has a lot at stake, too. It has been working on Balco steroid cases for nearly a decade, and Bonds, baseball’s home run king, is its most high-profile defendant.
What the jurors have in front of them now is two clear sides of the story: the prosecution’s assertion that Bonds knew he was lying and did so to protect his legacy in baseball, and the defense’s argument that the government singled out Bonds because of his fame and strong personality.
“A lot of venom in the government pursuit here is because he was not intimidated,” Allen Ruby, one of Bonds’s lawyers, said “He was not subservient. He was Barry.”
In front of a packed courtroom, Ruby characterized the prosecutors’ treatment of Bonds over the years as “abuse that’s been hurled at Barry Bonds.”
The government, however, told jurors that the case against Bonds did not involve any conspiracies. Nedrow said that lying to the grand jury compromised the basics of the criminal justice system and that Bonds — like anyone else — should be prosecuted if he committed perjury.
Bonds, 46, said he thought the substances he received from his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, were flaxseed oil and arthritis cream — and not the steroids and other performance enhancers prosecutors said they were.
Nedrow asked the jury if it was possible that Bonds, who Nedrow said was paid $17 million to be keenly in tune with his body, could be taking performance-enhancing drugs without knowing it.
“Ask yourself whether this person was unwittingly duped into using steroids, with the impact it had on him,” Nedrow told the jurors.
Nedrow asserted that Bonds had “a secret, a powerful secret” and, because of it, decided not to tell the truth to the grand jury. That secret, Nedrow said, was that he had been using anabolic steroids and human growth hormone.
In the end, people in Bonds’s close circle did know about his steroid use, Nedrow said, including Steve Hoskins, his former business manager; Kimberly Bell, his former mistress; and Kathy Hoskins, his former personal shopper. All those people testified against Bonds at the trial, saying that they either saw Bonds get injected, talked to him about his steroid use or noticed the side effects the government said he experienced because of his steroid use.
But in his portion of the defense’s closing statement, Ruby said that none of the government’s accusations were true and that the prosecutors did not prove their case.
He said Bonds was only prosecuted because the government did not like his attitude during his grand jury testimony in 2003. Bonds refused to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ which irked the government, Ruby said.
Ruby later mocked the government’s assertion that Bonds’s head had grown larger because of human growth hormone use.
“This business about Barry’s head getting bigger, to use a legal term, is stupid,” Ruby said, as the courtroom broke out in laughter.
Ruby also said he was surprised at the government’s failure to show the amazing effects of what prosecutors called “powerful drugs.” He said he expected to see “people leaping tall buildings in a single bound,” but instead noted that Bonds said the substances Anderson gave him were never that helpful.
Cris Arguedas, another lawyer for Bonds, took over the argument, telling the jury it should not believe government witnesses like Bell and Steve Hoskins because they were given immunity in exchange for their testimony. Hoskins, she said, only testified because Bonds had accused him of stealing from him and had contacted the F.B.I. about it.
But Matthew Parrella, another prosecutor, had the last words to the jury. In a clear, commanding voice he said the defense failed to argue an important point: that its client never used steroids.
“There’s a real irony to this case,” Parrella said, asserting that the substances the defendant took to make himself strong did not do the trick. “He wasn’t strong, he was weak. He went to the grand jury and was too weak to tell the truth, despite the anabolic steroids.”
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