Legal News

We?re Talkin? Baseball (and the Law)

By Ashby Jones

For now, the Giants and Jets are the toast of Gotham (A Super Bowl XLIII matchup, anyone?). That said, we’ve got a couple of unfinished pieces of business from the diamond to get to this morning.

It’s been a while since former San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds has been on our radar screen — or the batter’s box, for that matter. But he’s back, at least for now, with news that Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California has dismissed three of the fifteen charges against him.

As it currently stands, Bonds will face 11 charges — 10 for perjury and 1 for obstruction of justice. His trial is set to begin on March 2. The charges stem from testimony Bonds gave to the grand jury during the investigation of BALCO, a Bay Area laboratory that was alleged to have distributed illegal performance-enhancing substances. Here’s the story from ESPN.com’s Mark Fainaru-Wada.

While, as Fainaru-Wada writes, “Illston’s decision does represent another blemish on the government’s prosecution of the home run king,” these sorts of rulings happen often and are largely procedural in nature. (Before the trial of Enron’s Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, for instance, several charges were dismissed.)

Meanwhile, the team that dispatched Bonds’s Giants back in the 2002 World Series — how could we forget that glorious outcome? — won its own court ruling yesterday. A three-judge California appellate panel ruled that the Los Angeles Angels did not discriminate against men when, as part of a Mother’s Day giveaway, the team handed out tote bags to women. Here’s the story from the LA Times.

The court upheld a lower court ruling that a California civil-rights act did not apply. “This important piece of legislation provides a safeguard against the many real harms that so often accompany discrimination,” Justice Kathleen O’Leary wrote in the opinion. “For this reason, it is imperative we not denigrate its power and efficacy by applying it to manufactured injuries such as those alleged by the plaintiff in this case.”

Still, the plaintiff, Michael Cohn, a Los Angeles psychologist, argued he had in fact won the case because the team gave away bags the following year to all fans, regardless of gender.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 25, 2008 (boomark / email).