Barry Bonds on a higher level

(OK, I admit it. I didn’t read the WHOLE article about Barry Bonds’ indictment. I don’t have that much patience. If I’m totally off base here, I hope someone will set me straight. I would have emailed this first to Ryan to get his perspective, but I don’t have his email address. So…)


Doesn’t it seem like the government’s case against Barry Bonds is based on him not cooperating with them while they were trying to build a case against him? So now they claim he is ‘obstructing justice’ – which in this case means that he isn’t helping them prosecute him for something. He isn’t being indicted for actually doing something that we would normally call ‘illegal.’ He is being indicted for… acting in self-defense?

Now I’m no Barry Bonds fan. I think he should have been removed from the game years ago. Baseball should have cleaned up its own act. I’m glad to see that his records are maybe being ‘asterisked’ or challenged in some way. But somewhere along the line the issue of whether or not he used performance-enhancing drugs (has that actually been established as a crime in itself?) got lost in the issue of the government’s investigation of whether he used performance-enhancing drugs. His alleged 'crime' has to do with the investigation, not the drug use.

For that matter, Martha Stewart was never tried for insider trading – that charge was dropped early in the proceedings because the government knew they couldn’t prove it. She was charged, basically, with trying not to get charged. And she was convicted!

Nearly every arrest that is reported in our local news has to do with ‘conspiracy’ or ‘resisting’ or ‘obstructing’ – and that is mostly what the charges actually are. People aren’t getting arrested any more for stealing or raping or killing. They are getting arrested (and tasered or sprayed with pepper spray) for crossing paths with a ‘law enforcement officer.’ I have no doubt that there is still a lot of stealing and raping and killing going on out there and truly wish that people were getting arrested for doing those things, but instead it seems like the concentration is, these days, on ‘thought’ crimes. And I suspect that anyone could be tripped up once the wheels of ‘government investigation’ get rolling. Isn’t anyone else worried about this?

Years ago, in small-town Alaska, I had a conversation with the then-police chief about the new laws that allowed the police to confiscate cars and homes and anything else that was peripherally involved in a drug charge. He was positively gleeful; couldn’t wait to get his hands on that house in town that his department had known for YEARS was hiding some pot plants. The conversation gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I am about as anti-drugs as anyone, having worked with alcoholics/addicts as a rehab professional and teenagers as a school counselor, but the idea of the state confiscating private property really bothered me on a higher level. It seemed like a ‘slippery slope’ sort of thing even then. Just Wrong. Yes, more wrong than the drug possession.

It isn’t enough to just believe someone is a louse and want to ‘get him.’ Poor judgment can’t really be a crime or we’d all be in jail. “Thinking” about something can’t be worse than doing it. And if you can’t prove someone ‘did it’ then should you be able to just proceed to ruin them anyway because they might have been thinking about it and didn’t want you to know that?

We’re in trouble as a nation when the state can seize our property. We are in trouble as a nation when the state can trump up charges against us and throw us in jail – or make it so that we lose everything we have defending ourselves. We’re in trouble when virtually ANY of us could be charged with a crime. And looking at Barry Bonds, and Martha Stewart and Joe Blow, I suspect we could. If our government decided, on the basis of thin air, to investigate us – they could find a way to charge us with something simply as a result of our reaction to their investigation. It is happening all around us.

Is this the way we want things to be? For any of us?