Twelve people have been picked to sit in judgment of Barry Bonds. A couple of them are baseball fans, but not serious ones. They haven’t heard of BALCO or, if they have, they don’t know anything about it, really. I sometimes find myself surprised that someone could not know anything about this stuff but then I remember that I do nothing but read about baseball all day. If you asked me the first thing about any off-the-ice hockey news, for example, I couldn’t tell you a damn thing and I’m nominally a member of the sports media. It doesn’t shock me at all that you can find 12 people who are largely ignorant of the Barry Bonds case in a single day of jury selection. Guys like this tend to get left off juries.
According to the Daily News, one of the jurors is a young woman who graduated college Phi Beta Kappa, which makes me wonder who actually puts that down on official forms of any kind even if they are Phi Beta Kappa. Another flew choppers in Vietnam. One is always tempted to stereotype jurors based on this sort of information, but you almost always find yourself surprised by how they vote and what they thought about the trial when you interview them after a case. Everyone has jury horror stories, but for the most part people take the job seriously. They’re not perfect, but my experiences with juries are one of the things that allow me to maintain confidence in the system.
With a jury seated, today is the day that Greg Anderson gets called before Judge Ilston again, will refuse to testify again and, unless Judge Ilston is just sick of the guy, she will likely send him back to jail again. One has to marvel at a person who is so committed to a course of action that has no apparent upside for him. A lot of commenters around here have said in the past that Bonds has to be paying the guy off or something, but if there’s one thing the government is outrageously good at doing it’s tracing money. If Anderson shows any amount of financial largess in the next decade — and I mean even if he buy premium gas or super-sizes his value meal — he’ll likely have IRS agents tracing his accounts back to his grade school paper route and monitoring them until his dying day, eager to see if they can find anything with which to bring new charges against Bonds and Anderson. The upshot: I’m skeptical that Anderson’s refusal to testify is premised on some kind of payoff, be it promised, assumed or merely wished for.
Of final note was Judge Ilston’s order to the jurors, as reported in the Mercury News:
The judge and lawyers stressed in jury selection that the case, despite its dramatic connection to steroids and baseball, centers on allegations about lying under oath to a grand jury. “You must decide the case on the evidence presented at trial,” Illston told the potential jurors. “You will not be asked to decide whether you like or don’t like steroids.”
And with their theory blown out of the water, the government likely frantically re-wrote their opening statements and direct examinations.
Onward into the trial.