Congress is going to investigate Sammy Sosa for perjury:
A congressional committee will look into former baseball slugger Sammy Sosa's denial that he used illegal performance-enhancing drugs in light of a report that he tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003. The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Democratic Rep. Edolphus Towns of New York, says that the committee takes seriously suggestions that a witness had been misleading.
Towns said in a statement Wednesday that he will determine the appropriate steps following a review of the matter.
Given Tuesday's news, there is no question that Sammy was, at the very least, being cute with Congress during his 2005 testimony. That said, I don't think anything will come of this and don't expect that Sosa will ultimately be charged.
Why? Because Sammy never appeared to have actually said that he didn't do steroids. He said "To be clear, I have never taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs." He said "I have not broken the laws of the United States or the laws of the Dominican Republic. I have been tested as recently as 2004, and I am clean." Those statements -- and many others he made during his testimony -- allow for the possibility that he used substances that were legal in the Dominican Republic that would have been illegal to use in the United States.
I know that such a distinction is going to make a lot of you mad, but federal perjury law is really, really, clear in holding that responses to questions made under oath that relay truthful information in and of themselves, but that are intended to mislead or evade the examiner cannot be prosecuted. Instead, the criminal-justice system requires that the questioner -- in this case Congress -- diligently followup on such answers and suss out the misleading nature of the response themselves. A relatively non-technical summary of that law can be found here. And yes, it's an unpopular law in some circles, but it is the law, and there are several good reasons for it being as it is.
I don't know what Sammy Sosa took, when, and where. But neither does Congress, and they didn't try to obtain that information in 2005 even though they were presented with an opportunity to do so. And believe me, there were lawyers all over that hearing room, and you can bet that many of them were aware of the implications of Sosa's carefully-phrased statements that day. If they wanted to nail him for perjury, they should have nailed him down then.
But they didn't, and because of that, I think he skates.
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Even excepting Sosa's testimony, what's the legality around the supposedly leaked confidential information that got this whole thing started anyway? Would those results be admissible as evidence in a perjury trial? If not, I can't see how there would be any grounds for a case anyway.
Do players such as Sosa and Rodriguez have any grounds for a suit against the powers that were supposed to destroy these test results and did not? It seems to me like they would, since their reputations are being destroyed (granted, it's their own actions seeing the light of day) by evidence that they were told would not exist?
I think the info would be admissible. The player lists are not in and of themselves confidential in the way that, say, state secrets are confidential, they just weren't allowed to be disseminated by a relatively small number of people who had access. Once that happened, bam, I think the information is public. At least whatever portion of the information has been released.
No idea if there's a lawsuit there against the powers that be who were supposed to destroy the info. Depends on the nature of the assurances they were given that the stuff would be destroyed. If it was part of the CBA or some other contract, maybe there's something to it. And you're right, the damages theory would be a bit strange in that, really, the damage to the reputation was, at botton, caused by the player's own actions. The damages for releasing that info might be considered nominal.
I probably need to think about all of that more, however.
Congress investigating someone for lying? Sounds like a Man Bites Dog story to me...