Barry Bonds's lawyer, Michael Rains, who has an impressive if non-traditional resume, took some nice cuts at the government's case in recent interviews. Reading between the lines, it seems Rains has already picked his defense and needs to get it out there in the press. He's alleged an unspecified ethical violation by the prosecutors. I will follow up once we learn his theory on that. Some critics have suggested that Rains's tough talk will backfire, because it may harden the prosecutors' stance and force Bonds to fight the matter all the way through trial. I can't discout that 100%, but what were the odds that the prosecutors were going to offer Bonds a generous settlement anyway?
In the mean time, here are some choice quotes from Rains, as provided in these two articles:
"[The DOJ] doesn't know if waterboarding is torture and can't tell the difference between prosecution and persecution."
"My initial reaction was that they cherry-picked four statements occupying a combined total of two or three minutes of testimony out of what amounted to four hours of testimony in December of 2003."
"Barry got up on the stand and did his best to answer questions and to answer them truthfully." "He told them like it is."
"They have spent millions of dollars and turned (chief Balco investigator) Jeff Novitzy loose in an unsupervised fashion for half a decade now." "They need to say they got something for their efforts. Why not take a flier now?"
"Everybody has an opinion about Barry. A lot of people love and respect him and a lot of people dislike him. He understands that." "Whether you like him or dislike him, the way the federal government has proceeded in this case is going to be a very, very sad commentary on the enormous power of the government to ruin people's lives and to scar their reputation for no good reason."
Advocacy outside the courthouse is sometimes frowned upon, but sometimes is what the client needs. It's seems that Bonds is going to come out fighting.