The defense made lightning fast work of their side of the case in the Barry Bonds perjury trial and rested in the first hour without the testimony by Bonds or anyone else.
The prosecution chose not to put on any rebuttal witnesses.
Defense attorney Allen Ruby told U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, "The defense is prepared to rest."
The judge dismissed the jury for the rest of Wednesday and said that closing arguments would take place Thursday.
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Also in court Wednesday Bonds got some good news, as the government agreed to drop one charge against him. But the smiles on the faces of the defense did not last long.
Illston then sided with the prosecution and ruled against the defense on a slew of other motions.
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The count that was dropped was Count 4, in which Bonds said he never received "anything" from trainer Greg Anderson prior to 2003.
Bonds now faces four counts in the case -- three counts of perjury and one count of obstruction.
That's not precisely great news, but it is big news, because each additional count carries additional possibilities for time spent in jail. (Or length of punishment, at any rate.)
On the motions, there were several of them from Bonds' defense team that were denied, per George Dohrmann.
A motion to have the testimony of other athletes -- Jason Giambi, Jeremy Giambi both testified in the case -- stricken from the record was denied.
A motion to strike a section C of the first Steve Hoskins recording was denied (and, obviously, the second recording wasn't allowed in either), which isn't surprising since it was introduced ahead of time and while it may be poor quality, it's at least somewhat hear-able.
And a motion to deny the discussion of side effects of steroids and HGH was denied. That seems kind of obvious since, you know, it's a fairly important way to judge whether or not someone's used steroids. Although a point could be made that it's reasonably speculative.
Following these rulings by Illston, the defense promptly rested. That's pretty surprising, but it also means that Barry Bonds will not be testifying at his own trial. Which isn't surprising, but given the possibility that he might, which popped up yesterday, it's at least newsworthy.
But what does all of this really mean? It means we're likely to see a conclusion to the Bonds trial sooner than later, which is kind of nice, since he's obviously the reason the Giants can't win any real baseball games.
And it'll be nice to have this thing wrapped up -- at the moment it might appear there's some concern for Bonds' legal team because the government won a slew of motions, but it's still tough to imagine that Bonds will get any actual hard time following the conclusion.
