Posted by ESPN News Services:
SAN FRANCISCO -- Barry Bonds asked a federal judge Monday to toss out most of the government's case against him that charges the slugger lied to a federal grand jury about his alleged steroids
use.
In a filing made in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, lawyers for baseball's home run king argue that many of the charges stem from ambiguous answers to ambiguous questions posed by prosecutors.
Bonds is charged with 15 counts of making false declarations to a grand jury in December 2003 and one count of obstruction of justice. His lawyers on Monday asked a judge to toss out 10 charges. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts and is scheduled for trial on March 2.
Each count is attached to a specific question and answer or denial. While rarely are these motions
granted, in this case many of the questions were indeed somewhat ambiguous, so it's possible some counts could be dismissed, but unlikely it'd be more than a few.
Even if the judge throws out the charges in question, Bonds is still going to trial, ESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack reports. It will take the judge two to three months to rule on Bonds' request.
The 44-year-old Bonds, an unsigned free agent, hit .276 last year with 28 home runs, 66 RBIs and a major league-high 132 walks. He doesn't admit nor deny using steroids in the latest court filing.
Instead, Bonds' lawyers argue that "the questions posed to Mr. Bonds by two different prosecutors at his grand jury appearance were
imprecise, redundant, overlapping and frequently compound."
For instance, they argue that when Bonds denied if he had "taken anything like" steroids, he was answering a "fundamentally ambiguous" question.
A spokesman with the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco declined comment.
The 15 counts pending against Bonds are contained in a second federal indictment charging Bonds with repeatedly lying when he testified that he never used performance-enhancing drugs.
A federal judge threw out the first indictment and ordered prosecutors to draft a new one after she found some charges contained multiple allegations. The superseding indictment charged Bonds with making "false declarations" instead of "perjury."
August 31, 2008
