Barry Bonds’ trial begins today. It’s expected to last a two-to-four weeks. First up on the agenda is jury selection which, I assume anyway, will take up the whole day. I love jury selection in a high profile case, by the way. It’s always fun to see the folks who say they haven’t heard a thing about a case that’s been in the news for years. I’d be curious to see polling of people who live in the Northern District of California to see just how many people truly haven’t heard about the Barry Bonds case.
But that’s our system, I suppose, and there’s not much that can be done. And at least the people in the Northern District of California aren’t likely to read the Daily News that much. Because if they do, they’d learn in the first few paragraphs that Barry Bonds is staying “in plush comfort in a suite on the 16th floor of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco - the same sort of suite where U.S. Presidents stay when they visit the city by the bay,” which isn’t at all designed to make him seem imperious or anything. And they’d also note that “he appears visibly smaller than he did during his playing days.” Unlike all of those other athletes who maintain a hardcore training regimen four years after they retire.
Not that the Daily News isn’t correct on its facts. For example, this fact seems closest to the truth about this prosecution than anything I’ve read in the past couple of years:The government wants to make Bonds a felon, even if Illston’s history of BALCO sentencing makes it extremely unlikely that Bonds would see the inside of a prison cell.
Their motivation? Having spent millions prosecuting the landmark case, the government wants to close out the BALCO saga with a perfect streak of convictions that began with guilty pleas from the drug ring’s central conspirators and ended with the failed appeals of track cyclist Tammy Thomas, who was convicted in 2008 of crimes nearly identical to those Bonds is charged with committing: perjury and obstruction of justice.Play ball.