Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Former Baseball Star Framed

Story first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

A former Major League Baseball pitcher never used steroids and is the victim of a greedy former trainer and overzealous prosecutors, his lawyer told a U.S. District Court jury Tuesday as opening statements concluded in the former pitcher's perjury trial.

The lawyer told jurors a "tale of two men." One was his client, a hardworking, seven-time Cy Young Award winner who spent Friday nights in high school running from foul pole to foul pole with weights strapped to his arms and legs to build up his strength.

The other was a former strength trainer and the witness on whom the prosecution's case could hinge. He has said he injected the former pitcher with banned performance-enhancing drugs on multiple occasions.

The defendant is charged with lying about those injections when, in 2008, he told a congressional committee investigating steroid use in Major League Baseball that he had never used steroids. He faces about a year and a half in prison if he is found guilty.

The defense lawyer said Tuesday that his client was telling the truth and that his former trainer was the liar, suggesting that the trainer had implicated his star client to boost his own fame and fortune. A Birmingham Libel, Slander and Defamation Lawyer is following the case.

Baseball Great Wove Web of Lies, Prosecution Says

The defense lawyer painted the trainer as a money-grubbing opportunist who once sold advertising space on his tie before appearing in front of cameras. He showed pictures of a clownish-looking man laughing on the couch of "The Howard Stern Show" and giving a thumbs-up next to a woman's chest. No one would have invited him on the popular show or signed him to a book deal if he hadn't been the man who claimed to have helped one of baseball's greatest pitchers cheat.

The Assistant U.S. Attorney anticipated the attacks on the former trainer's character in his opening statement Monday afternoon, saying that the trainer had made mistakes but had acknowledged them.

Prosecutors are trying for a second time to convict the former pitcher. Their first attempt ended in a mistrial after prosecutors showed jurors a tape that included a congressman reading from an affidavit signed by the wife of a former teammate. The judge had said the testimony was inadmissible.

Prosecutors on Monday afternoon displayed a picture of their key physical evidence, a set of needles and cotton balls that the trainer said he used to inject the steroids. The materials were found to contain both the defendant's DNA and banned substances.

The defense lawyer said that evidence was tainted. In contrast with the sterile-looking photograph used by prosecutors, he showed an image of the evidence next to the empty Miller Lite beer can where the trainer had stored it. He injected the defendant with legal substances and then added traces of steroids to the needles to frame the pitcher.

It was the lies that spurred the former pitcher to go before Congress and say under oath that he hadn't used banned performance-enhancing drugs. That, he said, shouldn't be the cause for a federal prosecution.


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