May 13, 2008 8:56 pm US/Pacific
Bonds Charged On 15 Counts In New Indictment
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5 / AP / BCN) ―
Barry Bonds was charged in a new indictment Tuesday with 15 felony counts alleging he lied to a grand jury when he denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs use and that he hampered the federal government's doping investigation.
The career home run leader originally was charged in November by a federal grand jury with four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice, but in February U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered prosecutors to rewrite the indictment because multiple alleged lies were lumped into individual charges.
On Tuesday, a grand jury indicted Bonds on 14 counts of giving false declarations to a grand jury in 2003 and one count of obstruction of justice. No new lies were alleged in the new indictment.
"It's exactly the same," Golden Gate University law professor Peter Keane said. "It's two ways of saying it's lying and there's really no substantial difference between what he was charged with then and what he is charged with now."
The case against Bonds remains built on whether he lied when he told the grand jury that his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, never supplied him with steroids and human growth hormone.
"Barry Bonds is innocent," the player's lead attorney, Allen Ruby of San Jose, said Tuesday evening. "He was innocent before he was re-indicted and he is now."
"We've been many months with a defective indictment. Now we'll study (the new one) and proceed in the right way," Ruby said.
Bonds is scheduled to be arraigned on the revised charges before a federal magistrate on June 6 and then appear before Illston for a status conference and possible scheduling of a trial date later that morning.
Ruby said Bonds would appear in court to plead not guilty to the new charges.
A spokesman for U.S. attorney's office was not available for comment.
Bonds set the Major League Baseball record for career home runs last year, when he hit 28 homers to raise his total to 762 -- seven more than Hank Aaron's previous record.
He played for the San Francisco Giants for 15 seasons until they decided they didn't want him back after last year. The MLB Players Association said last week it was investigating whether to file a collusion grievance against teams for not pursuing Bonds after the Giants let him go.
The 43-year-old outfielder, a seven-time NL MVP, said he wants to play this year and his agent claims no team has made an offer for the 14-time All-Star.
The baseball slugger is one of 11 people who have been charged in connection with a sports steroids scheme operated out of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO —and of those, he is one of three who have thus far not pleaded guilty in a plea bargain.
Eight defendants, including Anderson, BALCO founder Victor Conte and former Olympic track star Marion Jones, pleaded guilty to charges of distributing performance-enhancing drugs, money laundering or lying.
A ninth defendant, former cycling champion Tammy Thomas, went to trial and was convicted by a jury in Illston's court last month of three counts of making false statements and obstructing justice before the grand jury. She was acquitted of two other false statements charges.
The remaining defendant, track coach Trevor Graham, is due to go on trial in Illston's court on Monday on charges of lying to investigators during an interview at his lawyer's office in North Carolina in 2004.
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