JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS - Former Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens stops to sign a baseball for a fan as he leaves the federal courthouse Friday.
The most shocking, inexplicable error in modern baseball history has taken place in a courtroom, not on a field.
On Thursday, the prosecution in the perjury case of United States v. Clemens committed an unforced gaffe so stunning that the sports world, and no doubt the legal community, will oscillate between pity and ridicule, incredulity and laughter, for years.
Mistrial. Case thrown out of court.
“I think that a first-year law student would know you can’t bolster the credibility of one witness with clearly inadmissible evidence,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said.
Especially when the judge has specifically warned the prosecution against doing that before the trial ever began.
A hearing has been set for Sept. 2 to decide whether Clemens can be retried or whether that would constitute double jeopardy, which would allow Clemens to simply walk away from this entire nightmare.
The dominant impression of this thunderclap day is that Clemens dodged a hail of legal beanballs without ever moving. His own sport has clearly considered him guilty of cheating for more than three years. With no motive to unearth evidence against its only seven-time Cy Young Award winner, baseball ended up with Clemens as the centerpiece of its Mitchell Report simply because so much evidence against him fell in its lap.
Now, after the government has spent months and millions to assemble every shred of negative information about him that it could muster, Clemens not only was gifted a mistrial but received it before the prosecution could send even one witness to the stand to tarnish him. If this blunder had occurred 10, 20 or 30 days into a trial, how much would those 45 government witnesses have said to damage his legacy?
If a retrial is denied, those voices may be mute forever.
Double jeopardy law can be complex. If prosecutors try to create a mistrial or goad the defense into seeking one as a tactic to “get another bite of the apple,” then the defendant might indeed end up walking away without a second trial. But if the mistake is just a blunder by the prosecutors, sometimes there is still a second trial. There are many variations. Right now, it’s probably too soon to know.
What’s certain is that, while some drama arrives in the ninth inning, this trial barely got past the lineup cards. Less than 24 hours after opening statements were heard, Walton suddenly stopped the proceedings and declared a mistrial because of a mistake so elementary and fundamental that he berated the prosecutors in open court.
If you think a slow-hopping groundball is an easy chance, wait until you grasp what the prosecution messed up, demolishing its own expensive taxpayer-funded foundation. Some say this case should never have been brought. But once it reached Courtroom 16, many considered the prosecution to be a lock — or maybe a lockup for Clemens.
One important piece of evidence was Andy Pettitte’s testimony that Clemens had told him he had taken human growth hormone. In previous proceedings, Pettitte’s wife Laura signed an affidavit affirming that her husband told her of the conversation the day it occurred.
The Post Most: SportsMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
| 12:00 PM | Free Range on Food: Chef's tools, summer cookbooks and more LIVE NOW |
|---|---|
| 12:00 PM | The Reliable Source Live LIVE NOW |
| 2:00 PM | The Web Hostess: Online manners, memes and must-see video |
Loading...
Comments