Legal News

Barry Bonds?s Lawyer To Help Pick Next U.S. Attorney in NorCal

By Amir Efrati

If your defense lawyer is on a committee that will help determine which federal prosecutor will handle your criminal case, does that help you?

That’s the question being pondered by NYT, which reports that Barry Bonds’s lawyer, Cris Arguedas, is part of a committee advising California Senator Barbara Boxer on whom she will ask the president to nominate to become the next U.S. attorney in San Francisco.

Bonds (pictured), the former baseball slugger, is facing criminal charges that he lied to a federal grand jury in 2003 about using steroids while playing for the San Francisco Giants. He still hopes to see some playing time before he retires, though no baseball team has called. (The Law Blog is thrilled that our beloved Giants are having their first successful campaign since Bonds left the franchise in 2007.)

But the next U.S. attorney could play an important role in deciding the outcome of the case. The district judge effectively gutted the government’s case in a ruling earlier this year, and the trial was put on hold pending an appeal of that ruling. (As it happens, Arguedas was on Boxer’s committee that helped nominate the district judge overseeing the case, Susan Illston, to the federal bench in 1995.)

Later this year the 9th Circuit court of appeals will decide whether prosecutors can use several pieces of evidence at trial, including positive drug tests. If the appeal is turned down, the U.S. attorney may have to weigh whether to proceed to trial or drop the case altogether.

Two law professors told NYT they didn’t think much about Arguedas’s position on Boxer’s committee. "The fact that this defense lawyer is recommending names to a senator is too remote, too distant, and too extenuated, and her power on the committee is diluted," Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, told the newspaper.

What say you LB Nation? Is this in any way a conflict?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 20, 2009 (boomark / email).