Feds drop case against MLB home run king Barry Bonds

The prosecution of Bonds for obstruction of justice ended quietly with the Justice Department’s one-paragraph court filing announcing that its solicitor general would not ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider a lower court’s reversal of Bonds’ felony conviction.

After a decade of investigating and prosecuting baseball’s home run king for obstruction of justice, the U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday morning it would not challenge an April reversal of the former San Francisco Giants slugger’s felony conviction.

The DOJ had been seeking to convict Bonds on charges of obstruction of justice over the hunt for performance enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball.

In a statement, Bonds said the finality of Tuesday’s decision gives him “great peace”.

“The most one can say about this statement is that it was non-responsive and thereby impeded the investigation to a small degree by wasting the grand jury’s time and trying the prosecutors’ patience”, he wrote.

A jury convicted the former San Francisco Giants star in 2011 of obstruction of justice for giving a meandering answer to a federal grand jury when asked about steroids injections.

Bonds testified that he wasn’t aware that substances he was using called the “cream” and the “clear” were in fact steroids. But he was caught in the middle of baseball’s BALCO performance-enhancing drug scandal in the early 2000s. But now, if we say “Barry Bonds committed no crimes”, we can know that the Feds agree – or at least that they didn’t feel his crimes were worth allocating any more taxpayer money toward.

“That’s what keeps our friendship”.

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 served his sentence, 30 days of home confinement, while he awaited his appeal.

“Thank you to all of you who have expressed your heartfelt wishes to me; for that, I am grateful”, Bonds said.