Judge set to sentence Barry Bonds

February 23, 2012, 4:13 am | Crime, Sports

Baseball legend Barry Bonds is scheduled to be sentenced Friday for his obstruction of justice conviction.

The hearing at 11 a.m. (2 p.m. ET) will take place in a San Francisco federal courtroom less than two miles from the ballpark where Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s major league home run record in August 2007.

Federal prosecutors want Bonds, 47, to serve 15 months in prison, according to a sentencing memo filed in court earlier this month.

Defense lawyers argued in their filing that the judge should accept the probation office’s recommendation that Bonds be sentenced to two years’ probation, fined $4,000 and ordered to perform 250 hours of community service.

Jurors who found Bonds guilty in April said he was “evasive” in his testimony to the federal grand jury investigating illegal steroids use by pro athletes.

“Because Bonds’s efforts were a corrupt, intentional effort to interfere with that mission, a sentence of 15 months imprisonment is appropriate,” the prosecution said in its memo to U.S. District Judge Susan Illston.

But jurors, who were deadlocked on three perjury counts, said that it was not proven that Bonds lied when he testified that he had not knowingly used steroids. Prosecutors decided not to pursue a retrial.

Prosecutors still argued in the sentencing memo that Bonds’ denial that he was “taking steroids and human growth hormone were patently false.”

Bonds’ testimony in December 2003 was part of the investigation that targeted Bonds’ personal trainer Greg Anderson and employees of the California drug testing laboratory known as the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO).

The testimony that led to Bonds’ conviction came when a grand jury prosecutor asked Bonds if Anderson ever gave him “anything that required a syringe to inject yourself with.”

Bonds told the grand jury that only his personal doctors “ever touch me,” and he then veered off the subject to say he never talked baseball with Anderson.

Defense lawyers argued that Bonds thought the creams and ointments Anderson was giving him were made of flax seed oils.

Sentences for other athletes convicted in connection with the BALCO investigation have not included prison time.

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