100 players tested positive for steroids in 2003, By: Bob Egelko
December 27, 2006
A federal appeals court revealed today that more than 100 major league baseball players tested positive for steroids in 2003, and ruled that the government could use their tests in its investigation of illegal drug distribution to athletes.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco also said federal investigators had obtained Major league Baseball's 2003 testing samples and results for 10 players linked to the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO, and that eight of them had tested positive for steroids.
The ruling mentioned no athletes' names, but San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds was part of the BALCO investigation and testified that he had never knowingly used steroids. A grand jury is investigating whether he committed perjury.
The government has expressed no intention of prosecuting any athlete for illegal drug use. The court quoted government lawyers as saying athletes who tested positive could be called before a grand jury and asked about their suppliers.
Five men, including BALCO founder Victor Conte, have pleaded guilty to illegal drug distribution in the case.
The Major League Baseball Players Association did not challenge federal prosecutors' authority to keep and use baseball's drug testing records of players, like Bonds, who were linked to BALCO. Those records were obtained in 2004 from two companies that conducted the testing for Major League Baseball, under search warrants that originated in the BALCO case.
But the association challenged prosecutors' seizure of records of any other players. Among the records seized by prosecutors, for example, was a spreadsheet that included the test results of the BALCO athletes plus other baseball players who had tested positive for steroids.
Three federal judges had ordered those records returned in separate rulings, saying federal agents had no advance evidence of steroid use by any player outside the BALCO investigation and no legitimate reason to hold the documents.
The judges, in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, accused prosecutors of misusing search warrants -- which had been approved by magistrates in uncontested proceedings -- to prevent the players and their association from challenging the searches.
The appeals court overruled all three judges in a 2-1 decision, saying the government is entitled to keep and use all computer records that were part of the same files as the BALCO material obtained from private drug-testing laboratories.
"We see no evidence of bad faith or pretext,'' said Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain in the majority opinion. He said prosecutors have legal grounds for retaining not only the BALCO-related records but also the "intermingled information'' of positive tests of other athletes.
Dissenting Judge Sidney Thomas said the ruling "puts Americans' most basic privacy rights in jeopardy.'' By the same rationale, he said, the government could seize the medical records of any patient that a hospital kept in the same computer file as a patient who was the target of a search warrant.
