The long, torturous path that has been the government's prosecution of former Giants slugger Barry Bonds will just about come to an end on Friday, December 16. Bonds will face Judge Susan Illston and be sentenced for his conviction of obstruction of justice.
The United States Probation Office put together a Presentence Report in which they suggested Bonds receive between 15 and 21 months of probation with some form of location monitoring. This amounts to house arrest, which is what Judge Illston has imposed in previous cases involving BALCO and performance-enhancing drugs.
The defense filed a sentencing memorandum in support of the probation office's suggestion of probation. The defense contends that Bonds deserves a relative amount of leniency due to several specific reasons:
1. The level of seriousness of the behavior leading to conviction
2. Bonds' prior history of good works
3. The fact that the conviction is considered an aberration when compared to the context of Bonds' entire life
The government submitted their own sentencing memorandum and they requested that Bonds be imprisoned for 15 months. The government contends that Bonds went into the grand jury room with the intention of deceiving and misleading the jury. In their memo, the government threw out much of the evidence they presented in the case. Of course, given that they lost much of the case, that makes their contentions in the sentencing memo rather ridiculous.
More than likely, Bonds will end up getting a moderate probation sentence with the location monitoring. The conviction was for something that was not remotely close to intentional deception. The judge in question has a history of imposing house arrest and that is likely what we will see here.