It's my non-attorney understanding that it is legal to pay someone not to testify but it is not legal to pay someone to lie under oath, i.e., commit perjury.
Does anyone think that Barry Bonds is not paying Greg Anderson not to testify against him, Bonds?
Anderson is a childhood friend of Bonds but come on. Who the heck goes to jail repeatedly for refusing to testify? What makes more sense is that each day Anderson holds out, Bonds deposits money into a Swiss bank account for Anderson. How about one million to start plus $10,000 a day? That would keep a lot of people quiet.
In 2005 Anderson pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute steroids and to money laundering. On October 18, 2005, he was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston to three months in prison and three months home confinement. In addition for refusing to testify against Bonds, Anderson has been sent to jail:
July 5, 2006 - July 20, 2006
August 28, 2006 - November 15, 2007
March 22, 2011 - duration of Bonds perjury trial.
I ask again: Does anyone think that Barry Bonds is not paying Greg Anderson not to testify against him?
I stumbled onto an article in today's Boston Globe, which makes this same point using The Godfather part II as metaphor. So how come none of the rest of the mainstream media, including those TV attorney annalists, NEVER mention the obvious? Are they afraid of being sued for libel? Are the TV pundits (see Jim Rome and puffed up guests as an example) using too much energy denying any interest in the Bonds trial? Are they just too cool to admit that if the trial were on TV that they would be all over it? Trials in federal court are not televised.
But why not even mention the obvious? Is it the same reason that they neglected the steroid story while it was happening? Maybe all these cool iconoclasts are really much more conventional than their on screen personas would suggest. Maybe they're simply hacks, just like their maligned predecessors in the daily tabloids decades ago.
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