Mark your calendars: The last act of the long-running BALCO sports steroids scandal – the perjury trial of baseball Home Run King Barry Bonds – should get underway sometime in late 2010, more than seven years after it began.
That’s the best guess of BALCO legal expert Peter Keane, Golden Gate University law professor. He’s been following the scandal since 2003, when federal agents raided the BALCO lab near San Francisco International Airport and seized evidence that some of the world’s greatest athletes were using undetectable designer steroids.
Bonds’ trial has been stalled for nine months by a pre-trial appeal, and some close to the case have speculated that federal prosecutors will eventually drop the whole thing. Keane doesn’t think so.
“Yes, in my opinion, we will see a Bonds trial,” he said. “Assuming the Ninth Circuit ruling comes down sometime in the next few months, it will be next fall, 2010.
“But if there are any more of these delays, they’ll be pushing Bonds into court in a wheelchair.”
Bonds, the biggest BALCO star of them all, swore to a grand jury in 2003 that he had never used steroids. Four years later, he was indicted for lying under oath. The government says it has absolute proof of the Giants star’s drug use. In 2000 and 2001, BALCO president Victor Conte was pre-testing Bonds, giving him steroids and then spinning the slugger’s blood and urine. Drug agents seized the test results in the raid. They show that Bonds was using two injectable steroids, nandrolone and methenolone, prosecutors say.
But Bonds didn’t deliver his blood and urine to BALCO himself. Instead, it was dropped off by his weight trainer, Greg Anderson, a confessed steroid dealer.
On the topic of Bonds, Anderson is the ultimate unavailable witness. He spent a year in prison for contempt of court rather than cooperate with federal investigators, and he says he won’t testify at Bonds’ trial, either.
And without Anderson ’s testimony, the drug tests are inadmissible hearsay evidence, defense lawyer Dennis Riordan has argued. Who’s to say Anderson didn’t bring somebody else’s blood and urine to BALCO and claim it belonged to the Home Run King?
To those who know their relationship, the idea that Anderson would do anything other than exactly what he was told by Barry Bonds is preposterous. Nevertheless, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston bought Riordan’s argument, and tossed the drug tests. The government appealed, stalling the case. In September, prosecutors went before three justices of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, trying to get the drug tests back in evidence.
Justice Carlos Bea seemed sympathetic, says Keane, but Stephen Reinhart and Mary Schroder, weren’t. “It’s always a crapshoot,” he says. He predicts that the government will soon lose – and then, a year from now, go to trial without the key evidence. The government has other evidence he says. Besides, after all this time, they are unlikely to give up on Bonds, whom he called “the Big Kahuna,” without a fight.
“The noise out of the U.S. Attorney’s office has been so emphatic that they’re going forward, no matter what, that they’d have a hard time backing away from it now,” he says.
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