Attorney pleads guilty to leaking BALCO testimony (2 SF Chronicle reporters to escape jail time)

AP on Bakersfield Californian ^ | 2/14/07 | Paul Elias and David Kravets - ap

[NormsRevenge]

Two San Francisco Chronicle reporters will avoid jail time after a criminal defense lawyer pleaded guilty Wednesday to leaking them secret grand jury documents from the BALCO steroids investigation.

Troy Ellerman admitted allowing reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada to view transcripts of the grand jury testimony of baseball stars Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield and sprinter Tim Montgomery, according to court documents. The Chronicle published stories in 2004 that reported Giambi and Montgomery admitted taking steroids while Bonds and Sheffield testified that they didn't knowingly take performance enhancing drugs.

A federal judge ordered the reporters jailed after they refused to divulge the source of the story. They have remained free pending an appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Ellerman's plea agreement stated that the federal prosecutors will no longer try to put the reporters in prison.

[NormsRevenge]

Maybe the attorney can sign up for the prison baseball team to stay in shape,,,

Play Ball!!!

[Enterprise]

I wonder if they will send him to the medium security prison in Mississippi.

[Uncle Hal]

There must be more to the story than this. Why would a lawyer throw away his career for this? Did he get money or what? Very strange. He most certainly will be disbarred and loose his right to practice law.

[johnmark7]

The thrill of the game was too delicious for him to pass up. A lot of big money, well paid, defense lawyers crack up, sabotage their lives, go off the deep end. Their egos are huge, their intoxication with their Self is enormous, they feel invincible and want to see how much they can get away with.

There seems to be something about defense lawyering that brings out the latent criminal inside them. Getting a**holes off scott free or nearly so takes a kind of subtle toll. Call it subconscious guilt for undermining their society, betraying the tribe, and letting the wolves into the herd.

You can't help scumbags, liars, thugs, punks, and so on and not have it affect you.

Prostitutes get hard real quick, and become really nasty skanks in no time at all. The same with these defense lawyers.

[Defiant]

I'm confused. How did a defense attorney get the transcripts, and if he got them, why did he have to keep them secret. I thought only prosecutors and grand jurors were required to keep GJ testimony secret.