Barry Bonds Found Guilty in Federal Steroids Probe Trial

Barry Bonds was found guilty by a jury of obstructing a federal probe into steroids in a verdict that a former baseball commissioner said may hurt the home-run record holder’s chances of getting into the Hall of Fame.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco declared a mistrial on three perjury counts after the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision on those charges. Jurors were unable to agree on whether Bonds lied when he told a grand jury in 2003 that he didn’t knowingly take steroids, and didn’t take human growth hormone or receive injections by his trainer.

Prosecutors said they will decide soon whether to retry the former San Francisco Giants left fielder on the perjury charges. Eleven members of the eight-woman, four-man jury voted to convict Bonds of lying about injections, nine jurors voted to acquit him on the human growth hormone count and eight voted to acquit on the steroids count, said the panel’s foreman.

“It will be seen by most people as affirming that Bonds was cheating and using steroids,” former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said of today’s verdict. “It diminishes his standing among baseball fans and historians, and it reduces his short-term prospects of getting into the Hall of Fame.”

The jury said the obstruction of justice conviction was for Bonds’s statements to the grand jury when he was asked whether his trainer ever gave him anything that “required a syringe to inject yourself with.”“This case is about upholding one of the most fundamental principles of our justice system,” U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag in San Francisco said in an e-mailed statement. “We cannot ignore those who choose instead to obstruct justice.”

Haag said her office will decide “as soon as possible” whether to retry Bonds on the remaining counts. Prosecutors said Bonds’s testimony was evasive and impeded the work of a federal grand jury that was hearing testimony about Anderson and Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, a Burlingame, California, lab at the center of an investigation of steroids distribution and use in professional sports.

The maximum sentence for obstruction of justice is 10 years in prison.

Robert Talbot, a University of San Francisco law Professor, said no other athlete convicted at trial in the federal steroids investigation had received jail time and it’s unlikely Bonds would. “Judges try to be consistent and so far the sentences in these cases have not been severe at all, either house arrest or probation,” Talbot said in a telephone interview. The jury first informed the court today that it had reached a verdict, and a few minutes later said the panel had only reached a unanimous decision on one count and couldn’t agree on the other counts, Tracy Sutton, Illston’s courtroom deputy, said in the courtroom packed with reporters, lawyers and members of the public expecting a verdict to be read.

After today’s verdict, the jury foreman said: “A positive test showed he used steroids but it did not prove he knew it.”

So this guy will pretty much get house arrest or probation….thoughts on that??

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