Justice Department Drops Barry Bonds Prosecution | South San

Major League Baseball had no immediate comment on the Justice Department decision. He served the home confinement portion while waiting for his appeal to be decided. That conviction was overturned in April by an 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. For almost a decade, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has examined Bonds for obstruction of justice and filed a one paragraph legal document stating it would not ask the Supreme Court to review a lower court’s reversal of his felony conviction.

“The DOJ could have asked the high court to take the case”, the AP report noted.

Bonds was legally cleared by an appeals court back in April.

Bonds, who will turn 51 on Friday, was accused in a 2007 indictment of perjury and obstruction of justice in 2003 before a grand jury that was investigating the distribution of performance-enhancing drugs to athletes by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO.

The jury deadlocked on three counts accusing Bonds of making false statements when he denied receiving steroids or human growth hormone or any substance that required a syringe for self-injection from the trainer, Greg Anderson.

The court said that prosecutors hadn’t proved that Bonds had obstructed justice by giving the grand jury a rambling response in which he described himself as the “celebrity child” of a baseball-playing father.

Despite that, he has not come close to being elected into the Hall of Fame due to his PED ties.

The case involved testimony Bonds, 50, gave to a grand jury in 2003 about whether he used steroids to help him hit more long balls.

The answer included musings about being “a celebrity child with a famous father” and other remarks jurors later said were meant to evade questions about his steroid use.

Bonds is the only one of 11 people charged in the BALCO case left without a conviction. His sentence of two years of probation and 30 days of home confinement was put on hold pending his appeal.

Bonds concluded his career in 2007 with 762 career home runs.