Bonds Indicted

Barry Bonds, all time leader in home runs in Major League Baseball, was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I've never seen these documents before," Bonds said, speaking before a federal grand jury investigating the Bay Area Lab Co-Operative, or BALCO, after he had just been shown what prosecutors say was a positive steroid test conducted on a player with the name Barry B. Bonds simply repeated, "I've never seen these papers." These results may be the key result to proving that Bonds lied under oath, giving him the charge of obstruction of justice. "Bonds' lawyers are expected to fiercely attack their reliability, much the way O.J. Simpson's legal team undermined the football star's murder case by questioning the handling of his blood samples." Michael Rains, who is Bonds' attorney, offered no comment on the subject. However, Victor Conte, founder of BALCO offered his own insight to how his legal team would cast their doubts on the evidence. According to Conte, a convicted steroids dealer, Barry Bonds came into the lab on Saturdays, always after regular business hours, with a group of men that included his trainer (Greg Anderson) and his personal physician (Dr. Arthur Ting).

Anderson had convinced Bonds that BALCO would develop a dietary and supplementary regimen, which Conte had designed based solely on the results of past blood and semen results. The only thing that the indictment does NOT say is WHERE the prosecutors obtained the results, only that they were obtained when federal agents raided Conte's lab back in September of 2003. "There is always an opportunity to attack that kind of forensic evidence through its chain of custody," said attorney William Sullivan, who recently won an acquittal for former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino on an obstruction charge alleging he withheld evidence in a terrorism trial in Detroit. "You look at how the evidence was preserved, who handled it," Sullivan said. "You can even attack the analysis itself. Conte said, "I don't think you can prove those were Barry's samples." So as of now, there is no way the jury can prove to anyone that Bonds has used steroids. Until they can, there is nothing that they can do. He will still be allowed to play baseball, and won't have to worry about the maximum 30 years in prison just yet, just how to prove that those results are either tainted, or not his at all.