Bonds’s Defense Rests Without Calling a Witness
Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
Barry Bonds arrives at the federal courthouse on the day his defense team rested without calling any witnesses in his perjury trial.
By JULIET MACUR
Published: April 6, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO — On the eve of closing arguments in the perjury trial of Barry Bonds, a federal judge on Wednesday granted prosecutors’ request to drop one of the five charges against him.
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The fourth charge in the indictment against Bonds was tossed out after the defense team and the judge questioned it. That count asserted that Bonds lied to a grand jury in 2003 when he said he never took anything — other than vitamins — before the 2003 baseball season that Greg Anderson, his personal trainer, asked him to take.
“No oils like this or anything like this before?” a prosecutor had asked Bonds at the grand jury.
Bonds answered: “No, no, no, not at all. Not at all.”
Illston on Tuesday said that the questioning in Count 4 was vague. She asked prosecutors what they meant when they asked Bonds if he ever took “anything” from Anderson.
“What, a milkshake?” she said, as some people in the courtroom giggled.
Dennis Riordan, one of Bonds’s lawyers, wondered if the prosecutors meant if Bonds had ever taken a hot dog from Anderson, which their sons could then share.
In a court filing, though, Bonds’s lawyers were more serious, saying that there was no evidence showing that Bonds had taken performance-enhancing substances called the cream or the clear before 2003. Prosecutors argued that the count charged Bonds with taking any type of steroid before 2003.
In the end, prosecutors seemed to know that the judge was skeptical of the charge. So they asked for its dismissal before she could throw it out herself.
Bonds, who broke Hank Aaron’s career home run record in 2007, is now facing four charges, including three that assert he lied to a grand jury in 2003 when he said he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs and never was injected by someone other than his personal doctor.
The fourth charge alleges that he obstructed justice by not telling the truth at the grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative steroids case.
Each of those charges carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence, though federal sentencing guidelines would drastically reduce that time. So, if convicted on any or all of the counts, Bonds is likely to be sentenced to a total of 15 to 21 months.
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