You’re a former professional wrestler who went to Stanford Law School and became a top-notch trial lawyer. You receive a call asking you to represent the most famous athlete in America in his trial on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that is that the athlete (ok, it’s Barry Bonds) will be arraigned the next day and the government has been preparing its case for four years with massive documentary evidence and numerous witnesses. Can you catch up in time to save your new client?
That’s the predicament facing Allen Ruby of San Jose, who, despite the close media scrutiny surrounding this case, was mentioned for the first time in connection with Bonds on Thursday night. He may well have been hired earlier that day, less than 24 hours before Bonds’ arraignment on Friday, at which, with Ruby as his lead lawyer, he pled not guilty. (A shocker if there ever were one.) Keep in mind that Bonds’ allegedly perjured testimony took place on December 4, 2003, so he’s had more than four years to pick a lead trial attorney.
The eleventh-hour hiring gives you a hint of what makes Ruby’s problem even worse: his client. Bonds has historically shown two personal characteristics that have made him his own worst enemy, and they have already come into play in his attempt to assemble a legal team.
One is his tendency to only trust people who have been his friend for a long time. According to media reports, he has depended on Danny Molieri, a bodyguard/private investigator/ex-police officer he has known since high school, to pick his legal team. Molieri got Bonds to hire Michael Rains, who specializes in representing police officers — but not federal criminal trials. Rains immediately tried to make the federal prosecutors look like Public Enemy No. 1, an ill-advised strategy that led to Bonds’ being blindsided three weeks ago by his indictment on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice.
But the personal characteristic that’s hurting Bonds even more is his bull-headedness. Last Friday he tried to hire John Keker, the top trial attorney in San Francisco and arguably the top criminal defense attorney in the country, who charges $900 an hour. Keker was being offered a dream case, but he turned it down, reportedly because Bonds, who is not exactly a pauper, wanted Keker to render his services at a major discount — and then to submit his legal bills to another law firm for review. Keker obviously figured he needed that like he needed a hole in the head.
So now it’s up to Ruby, who does his own research and writing and has a folksy affect in front of a jury. He, too, is considered one of the top trial attorneys in the Bay Area. Like him, his father was also a pro wrestler.
Ruby will be aided by Cristina Arguedas, another first-rate trial attorney known for extremely aggressive cross-examination. I’ll bet her number one assignment in the case will be to cross-examine the living daylights out of Kimberly Bell, Bonds’ ex-girlfriend, who in 2005 told a grand jury investigating the BALCO steroids case that in 2000, Bonds told her he was using steroids, specifically in a non-injectable form, which is what prosecutors allege he did.
Bell will be the star witness against Bonds. Apart from Bonds’ trainer, Greg Anderson, who spent months in jail rather than testify against him, Bell appears to be the only person who can testify not merely that Bonds used steroids, but that he knew he was using steroids.
Ruby and Arguedas (with Rains, who is still in the picture) will also have to get up to speed on the “mountain of evidence” that the government seized from the BALCO lab, including what appear to be doping calendars with the initials BLB on them (Bonds’ middle name is Lamar) and tests administered through BALCO that the government claims show Bonds used steroids.
There’s also Steve Hoskins, Bonds’ former business partner and friend, who is expected to testify about Bonds’ steroid use.
It’s conceivable that Bonds’ defense team could insist that the trial start in 60 days because of Bonds’ right to a speedy trial, in the hope that he’ll be acquitted before the start of the 2008 baseball season. But it seems more likely, given that they are so far behind the eight ball, that their strategy will be to make motion after motion challenging the government’s evidence, in the hope that the trial won’t start till after the 2008 season, so that Bonds can play ball this year.
Ruby may have already dropped a hint on Friday about Bonds’ baseball plans for this year. When the government argued at the arraignment that Bonds should give up his passport so he could only travel in the U.S., Ruby argued — successfully — that that would “disable Mr. Bonds from doing part of his job.”
Since the only major league team outside the U.S. is the Toronto Blue Jays, that seems to indicate that Bonds wants to go to an American League team. Whether any team chooses to sign a player who is under federal indictment is another question.
Source: Rocky road
