Home run king Barry Bonds’ fate is now in the hands of an
eight-woman, four-man San Francisco jury. After a day of legal
sparring that concluded a three-week trial, the jury on Friday
morning will begin its deliberations. They are faced with the
difficult task of sorting through conflicting evidence over whether
the former Giants superstar is guilty of three counts of perjury
and one count of obstructing justice for allegedly lying to a
federal grand jury in December 2003 about using steroids.
SAN FRANCISCO
Home run king Barry Bonds’ fate is now in the hands of an eight-woman, four-man San Francisco jury.
After a day of legal sparring that concluded a three-week trial, the jury on Friday morning will begin its deliberations. They are faced with the difficult task of sorting through conflicting evidence over whether the former Giants superstar is guilty of three counts of perjury and one count of obstructing justice for allegedly lying to a federal grand jury in December 2003 about using steroids.
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Prosecutors hammered away at Bonds’ defense strategy on Thursday, scoffing at the suggestion that a premier athlete who earned $17 million a year would not know what he was putting into his body and that he was receiving steroids from his childhood friend and personal trainer, Greg Anderson. As of Thursday evening, Anderson remained in jail for refusing to testify during the trial.
“All he had to do was tell the truth,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Nedrow told the jury. “He chose not to do it because he had a secret.
“He had a secret, a powerful secret,” Nedrow said of Bonds’ alleged use of performance enhancing drugs. “He had a concern it would taint whatever athletic accomplishments he had managed to achieve in his career.”
Not surprisingly, the defense smeared the prosecution’s case and depicted it as a misguided, headline-grabbing chase of a famous athlete that depended on a collection of unreliable witnesses and no evidence to rebut Bonds’ position that he testified truthfully to the grand jury that was probing the sprawling BALCO steroids scandal. “The evidence in this case,” Bonds’ attorney Cris Arguedas told the jury, “is unworthy of belief.”
The prosecution and defense traded wildly divergent portraits of the witnesses and evidence in the case as they spent hours arguing their positions to the jury. Prosecutor Matthew Parrella, for example, insisted that a tape recording made by former Bonds’ business associate, Steve Hoskins, of a conversation with Anderson in the Giants locker room in 2003 was a clear exchange about Bonds, steroids, injections and undetectable steroids such as the “cream” and the “clear.”
In one passage in that tape, Hoskins asked Anderson about the reason he always injected “Barry” in the “butt,” and Anderson replied that he always moved it around and never did it in the same place, which prosecutors argue is a direct reference to steroid shots. “We might not have Greg Anderson in the courtroom, but we have his statements,” Parrella told the jury. “Who else are they talking about?” he continued, referring to Bonds. “They’re talking about him.”
The jury is considering three distinct perjury counts: one, that Bonds lied about ever using steroids, saying to that question, “Not that I know of;” two, that he lied about ever being injected with anything, other than a doctor; and three, that he lied about ever being given human growth hormone by Anderson. The fourth obstruction charge is based on a collection of statements Bonds made to the grand jury, largely denying knowledge that anything Anderson supplied him with was a steroid.
Prosecutors relied heavily on what they called the “firsthand” account of Kathy Hoskins, Bonds’ former personal shopper, for the injection charge because she testified she witnessed Anderson injecting Bonds in the stomach, which also would be consistent with human growth hormone. They also cited the testimony of two hotly contested witnesses to support their theory, Steve Hoskins and Kimberly Bell, Bonds’ ex-mistress.
Trying to counteract the suggestion that Bell was no more than a jilted ex-mistress who was striking back at Bonds, Parrella tried to elicit sympathy for her, saying “All (the defense) could do was mock Kim Bell, all they could do was rage at her.”
Defense lawyers, however, savaged the government’s witnesses, reserving particular scorn for Steve Hoskins, described as a consistent liar. And Allen Ruby, Bonds’ lawyer, told the jury that Kathy Hoskins shaped her story to help her brother. “Blood is thicker than water,” he said, hoping to discredit her claim she saw Bonds get injected by Anderson.
As for Bell, Arguedas pointed out that she perjured herself on a number of subjects, including her allegation that Bonds’ testicle size shrunk. Arguedas, in fact, used the government’s reliance on the argument that steroids caused Bonds’ testicles to shrink as an indicator of a waste of money and time to pursue Bonds.
“This government in its zeal to go after Barry Bonds would forgive anybody, anything,” the feisty lawyer argued.
Ruby also pounded at a technical, but critical, aspect of the jury’s task. Prosecutors, to secure a conviction, must not only prove that Bonds knowingly lied to the grand jury, but also that it was material to the grand jury probe into the Balco case, which ultimately produced indictments against Anderson, Balco mastermind Victor Conte and others.
Prosecutors insist it was obviously material to the investigation. But Ruby told the jury otherwise, and insisted Bonds answered every question he was asked by prosecutors out to “intimidate.”
“A lot of the venom in the government’s pursuit here is that he was not intimidated,” Ruby argued. “He was not subservient. He was Barry.”
— Story by Howard Mintz, San Jose Mercury News
