Bonds Indicted

Breaking: Records in hand, Barry Bonds has just been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice:

Baseball superstar Barry Bonds was charged Thursday with perjury and obstruction of justice, the culmination of a four-year federal probe into whether he lied under oath to a grand jury investigating steroid use by elite athletes.

Um….wow. I don’t really know enough yet to say more.
UPDATE: The short answer here is, perjury and obstruction are serious crimes; at the same time, they – and their close cousin, lying to federal investigators – can sometimes be all too easily resorted to by overzealous prosecutors. The key issues in these cases, at least as far as the debate over whether charges should have been brought, comes down to the degree to which the defendant (1) blatantly misrepresented some fact and can’t reasonably be said to have just forgotten, misunderstood the question, or shaded the truth, and (2) placed, at least for some period of time, a genuine roadblock in the way of a legitimate investigation or lawsuit (i.e., the difference between hiding a fact and merely offering a strained characterization of known facts).

11 thoughts on “Bonds Indicted”

  1. I don’t think it bodes well for Bonds that his personal trainer was released from jail almost immediately after the indictment came out. It’s not hard to figure what finally gave the feds enough of a case to bring charges.

  2. I will confess to being surprised. First, I figured that the trainer would have cracked a long time ago or not at all. Second, I thought the best chance of Bonds getting indicted would be a tax crime. The timing makes one wonder if Bonds bought enough silence to finish the recent season. Regardless, it seems the free agent suitors for Bonds just disappeared. Unless things change dramatically, A-Rod now has a number (762) to shoot for over the next ten years. That means the guy who has averaged 44 a year needs to average 25 the next ten years in order to break the record. He is 32 now, so it is reasonable to expect four or five more very good years followed by two okay ones and then a couple Willie Mays as a Met type seasons. That should add up to around 800 give or take ???. Either way it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

  3. As you may remember, I have defended Bonds for quite some time. My contention has always been that baseball wise, until it was proven he broke the rules of baseball all of his records were offical and without the dreaded asterisk. Now it appears the Feds at least think they can prove he has used banned substances. If that is the case he should be banned from all baseball activities and ALL of his records removed from the books. Maybe this will send a lasting message to all would be cheaters.

  4. According to Anderson’s lawyers, he never testified in front of the grand jury. I guess he was released because the grand jury was closed. If that’s true, based on reading the indictment my uneducated opinion is that they’ll have a tough time getting a conviction – there’s too much stuff where the only people who could demonstrate that Bonds was lying are Bonds and Anderson. I guess we’ll see what evidence they have.

  5. Perjury and obstruction? Where have I heard those before?
    Oh, well, I’ll begin the cadre: “everybody does it”, “so what?”, “lies about sex”, “witch hunt”, “but the economy is so good”
    You knew someone would do it….

  6. It was all so bloody pointless. If he did take them (you’d have to be nuts to think he didn’t at this point), it was all so unnecessary. He was bonafide first ballot HOF without the damn steroids. Personally, I never cared a bit whether he caught AAron, or hit over 70 in a season. I cannot remember hearing anyone here in NorCal ever saying in the 90’s, well Bonds is good, but now that McGuire and Sosa have set their records, Barry is just not in thier class. What a stupid waste.

  7. I’ll bet he defends himself by saying he never “took” steroids because he never ingested or injected them. He’ll say he “applied” The Cream not knowing what it was or something.

  8. With Bonds, what it comes down to is being Stan Musial wasn’t enough. He wanted to be the Babe.

  9. Hey Daryl, Bonds was never Stan Musial even in the baseball sense, let alone the human being sense. Bonds was not a career .300 hitter until he started juicing and suddenly won a batting title. Without the juice, Bonds also doesn’t even come close to Musials total bases or extra base hits. Musial hit a ton of triples. Look at a list of the top triples hitters of all time sometime and see how many hit more than 200 home runs. You’ll be loooking for a while.

  10. Like NRA, I had high regard for Bonds’ ability long before he started breaking home run records. It’s tempting to forget that back in his Pittsburgh Pirate days (specifically the early 90s) Bonds was widely regarded as the best all around player in baseball.
    The pre-steroid Bonds: a solid career .290 hitter, on track to hit 350-400 home runs, 300+ career stolen bases, perennial MVP. That would’ve spelled MVP in my book.
    Alas…

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