Barry Bonds Obstruction Conviction: More Questions than Answers

2011-04-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/04/13/analysis-what-does-guilty-verdict-mean-for-bonds/

Now that Barry Bonds has been convicted, in part, of Obstructing a Grand Jury investigating whether he lied to a grand jury about taking steroids, more questions may have been raised than answered. Essentially, Bonds was charged (ultimately) with three counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice after his testimony to a grand jury. The Three Counts of Perjury (lying to the Grand Jury) which resulted in a dead-locked jury, with No Verdict and Ultimately a mis-trial as to those counts, shook out as follows in the deliberations:
1. Lying About Steroid Use (8-4 to Acquit)
2. Lying About Whether Someone other than his Doctor injected him (11-1 to Convict)
3. Lying About HGH use (9-3 to Acquit)

Bonds was found guilty of a single count of Obstruction Of Justice. The Jury found that Bonds was intentionally evasive, false, and misleading in giving testimony before the grand jury. The Indictment, was rather open ended and contained a catchall legalese phrase meant to incorporate as many possible avenues to snare a conviction. See if you can spot it here:

did corruptly influence, obstruct, and impede, and endeavor to corruptly influence, obstruct, and impede, the due administration of justice, by knowingly giving material Grand Jury testimony that was intentionally evasive, false, and misleading, including but not limited to the false statements made by the defendant as charged in Counts One through Four of this Indictment. All in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1503.

Ok I highlighted it for you. It seems a little odd that Bonds charges were at least partially constructed around a vague and nebulous legal phrase that lawyers insert into all sorts of documents where they seek to cover as many possible scenarios that they may not have even contemplated.

Nonetheless, the Obstruction Charge for which he was found guilty was centered on his statement in response to a specific grand jury question to Bonds: did his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, ever gave him a substance that required an injection. Bonds response: "I became a celebrity child with a famous father." As a result of that answer, Bonds now finds him facing a possible (albeit completely unlikely) ten (10) year Sentence in Federal Court.

Hence, Bonds was not found guilty of lying about steroid use, HGH use, or of getting injected. He was found guilty of being evasive in not saying "yes" or "no" to the question of whether his personal trainer injected him. Notwithstanding the seeming incongruity of finding Bonds Not Guilty of lying about whether his trainer injected him, yet finding him guilty of being evasive in answering that question, I believe the bigger question is what procedure should be followed in order to set up an Obstruction Charge in regard to answering questions before the Grand Jury. If Bonds statement was evasive, shouldn't the grand jury prosecutor have demanded a "yes" or "no" answer rather than allow Bonds to give a vague answer? Wouldn't Bonds then have known whether he was subject to criminal sanction if he failed to answer "yes" or "no"? To parse hours of questions and answers from a grand jury hearing in pluck out some evasive answer to a question, without properly demanding a specific answer seems difficult to swallow as providing a basis for a conviction. I am not saying that his answer may not have been evasive by design. However, in order for it to be criminally evasive, I do believe the Government should have done more at the Grand Jury hearing to try to lock Bonds into either answering "Yes" of "No."

I don't believe the prosecutors ever contemplated an obstruction conviction without a finding of guilt on at least one of the perjury charges. While that fact alone will be a basis for appeal, I think that the failure to follow up and demand a specific "yes" or "no" answer may prove even more problematic to the Government's mixed verdict.

Bonds' Trial is now over. But the questions it sought to have answered came back inconclusive and inconsistent at best. More legal questions than answers have certainly been raised than the four (4) questions presented to the Jury. In a Court of law, Bonds was found guilty of answering that he was a "celebrity child". Is that enough to pronounce a final verdict in the "Court of Public Opinion"? Regardless of how the legal end shakes out, the pulse of the people probably will not change much: his supporters will be buoyed by the mixed verdict while his detractors find more nails for the coffins they've constructed for his reputation.

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Barry Bonds Obstruction Conviction: More Questions than Answers