Barry Bonds: Finding Impartial Jury for Perjury Trial Over Steroid Use Difficult

“When Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s career home run record in August 2007, he was cheered in San Francisco despite the suspicion of steroid use that clouded his achievement.

Barry Bonds’s perjury trial is set to begin next week in United States District Court in San Francisco.

He played his final game for the Giants that September and was indicted two months later on charges that he lied in 2003 to a federal grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative steroids case.

Now Bonds is finally going to have his day in court. And fans who once cheered him may be among the 100 potential jurors for his perjury trial, which — after two years of delays — is set to begin next week in United States District Court in San Francisco.

As lawyers on both sides winnow the pool to 12 jurors and 4 alternates, they will no doubt be wondering how many still hold Bonds dear. “I don’t think you’ll see a lot of prospective jurors calling him a hero because all the publicity about Bonds since his retirement has been negative,” said Howard Varinsky, a jury consultant based in the Bay Area who worked on the trials of Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson. “I’m sure he still has fans, but a lot of people have grown very ambivalent. So things have changed. He’s disappointed a lot of people. . .””

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