Bonds Guilty Verdict Baffling

I'm reading Thursday's news report of the verdict in the Barry Bonds perjury trial: guilty on one count, mistrials in the other three. The conviction wasn't for any perjury charge, though: Bonds is supposedly guilty of "obstructing justice" because he digressed and appeared "evasive" in his statements to the grand jury probing allegations that Bonds had purposefully taken injections of steroids and human growth hormone to boost his baseball performance. Uh-h-h, say that again?!

Bonds appeared in person as a "witness" before the grand jury, which in fact was there for one primary reason: to determine whether charges should be leveled at various alleged participants in the baseball doping scandal, Bonds himself one of them. I personally don't dig the idea that grand juries or congressional committees can subpoena people whom they know all along are the actual suspects of their investigations and then give them the third degree on the stand, probing and probing until they can catch them in some sort of contradiction. Then, in this "gotcha" game of theirs, they forget the original "crime" and level perjury charges against the witness. Only with Bonds, he wasn't convicted of perjury: it was for supplying information about his childhood and his friendship with personal trainer Greg Anderson, who has been tainted in the investigation. This information apparently didn't contribute much to the jury's knowledge about the case, but does that really constitute "obstruction of justice"? After all, Bonds was there in person. Anyone could have pressed him as much as they would have liked about any matter that they though was pertinent. The idea of a grand jury being incapable of doing this because they are not versed in legal intricacies is invalid: they have the power to recommend prosecution!

If being evasive when asked a question is a crime, then let's just go ahead and arrest all of our elected officials for the same thing every time one of them dodges a difficult question that a reporter poses to them. Or take me: once in my tenth grade English class I wrote a short, rambling paper off the top of my head summarizing a book that I never read and knew very little about, receiving my school's equivalent of a "B" grade on this assignment. Talk about an evasive narrative! Time to haul out the handcuffs and slap 'em on me, coppers!