Spander: Time for government to forfeit case against Bonds
By: Art Spander
Special to The Examiner
June 10, 2009
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| The feds have had their opportunity to make an example of Barry Bonds and failed. It’s time to let it go. (AP) |
SAN FRANCISCO — To the question of whether anyone remains interested in Barry Bonds in his second year out of a Giants uniform, there is a clear and present answer: The U.S. attorney’s office does.
But not to join their team.
They are hardly interested in putting Barry behind, say, the No. 3 hitter. What they want is to put him behind bars.
Lots of luck.
A few days past, federal prosecutors filed a brief requesting a reversal of U.S. District Judge Susan Illston’s well-known decision to bar from Barry’s perjury case evidence she determined to be hearsay.
Yes, Judge Illston’s ruling came back in February, and this is June, but the wheels of justice grind slowly, sort of the way Bonds moved out in left field his last year with the Giants, the 2007 season.
Peter Keane, Dean Emeritus of the Golden Gate University School of Law, told the New York Daily News that the recent government filing “reeks of desperation,” and is merely “postponing the inevitable.”
So feds, give it up already.
We admire your perseverance and attention to detail. If George Washington told the truth, ballplayers probably ought to do the same.
And anybody who has dealt with him, in a courtroom or in a clubhouse, understands Barry can be uncooperative, abrasive and a pain, thus there is an eagerness to get after the man.
But enough. Barry didn’t sell people sub-prime mortgages. Barry didn’t run off with anyone’s 401 (k). Barry didn’t tell the world Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The government essentially is wasting millions of our dollars trying to make a mark against a guy who has made his mark, 762 career home runs. What if he were just a singles hitter with a .238 lifetime average?
“These documents tend to show that Bonds was lying when he testified in the grand jury that he did not knowingly take steroids,” U.S. attorney Barbara J. Valliere wrote in a 56-page argument dealing with Bonds.
Los Angeles attorney Mark Geragos, who represents Bonds’ trainer Greg Anderson — aka The Guy Who Won’t Talk — called the government’s appeal, “The last vestige of scoundrels.”
The dirty rotten kind or just the ordinary garden variety?
Maybe Barry is guilty, maybe he isn’t. What does it matter any more?
The guy we could call the Slammer for all those long balls is not going to the slammer. He’s almost certainly not even going to trial.
Which is fine with me. Spend the money on something worthwhile, cancer research, feeding the underprivileged. I keep getting images of Javert, the police inspector in Les Miz, who stalks Jean Valjean through the years.
Does America care more that Bonds seemingly cheated in baseball than a lot of guys at banks and loan agencies cheated people out of their homes?
Can’t the feds and Barry, who now also has domestic problems, call this battle a tie without plans for a makeup game?
Bonds’ attorneys might tell the prosecutors how much they admire persistence. The prosecutors might tell Barry and his counsel that while there’s no clock in baseball there should be one in perjury cases.
Then the attorneys can write books and make tons of money. It’s as American as apple pie, motherhood and denial of steroid use.
Art Spander has been covering Bay Area sports since 1965 and also writes at www.artspander.com and www.realclearsports.com.
E-mail him at typoes@aol.com.
