Opening statements for the Barry Bonds perjury trial in U.S. District Court are scheduled to be heard today, and I’ll speak for the majority of America when I make an underhanded fist about navel-high and shake it dismissively. The lynchpin in the case for the feds is the testimony of Greg Anderson, who served as Bonds’s personal trainer while he was cracking home runs into McCovey Cove.
Along with the swearing in of the jury and opening statements, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston is expected to send the jurors out of the courtroom Tuesday so she can send Bonds’ former personal trainer Greg Anderson to jail.
Illston told Anderson on March 1 that she plans to have him kept in custody for the length of the trial if he follows through as expected on his vow of silence. Anderson’s attorney, Mark Geragos, said he will argue that Anderson can’t be jailed on contempt charges because he already served a little more than a year on similar charges after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Bonds.
The trial is expected to last two to four weeks, and jurors have been ordered explicitly to not discuss the trial on the internet. Hi, jurors! But now I feel like I know how some people felt during the OJ trial, because this seems like a big waste of time, especially since Bonds’s alleged perjury occurred in sealed testimony that never should have been leaked to the public. Hey, the guy hit 73 home runs in a season! I don’t care how shriveled up his balls might be.
