Perjury

News item: The Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers meet Thursday night in a renewal of one of the NFL's greatest rivalries, but two-thirds of American homes will not get the game because of a dispute between the NFL Network and the major cable providers. My take: It'll be a great night to own a sports bar. I'll have the chicken fingers, the nachos, the mini-burgers, two orders of jalapeno poppers and a Diet Coke. News item: Disgraced track star Marion Jones was stripped of all her victories since September 2000 and ordered by the International Association of Athletics Federation to repay $700,000 in winnings.

New spring, same old top story. There are plenty of intriguing subplots as baseball breaks from its winter hiatus and pitchers and catchers start playing long toss this week in Arizona and Florida. But, as usual, none can top the sport's most consistent newsmaker, the incomparable Barry Bonds. Throughout this decade, Bonds has been a must-read spring story: Can he still play at a Most Valuable Player level? Will he hit a historic number of home runs? Is he healthy? Is he cracking under media scrutiny?

One day after Barry Bonds was indicted on federal perjury and obstruction charges, the sports world's other famous subject of a federal investigation, Michael Vick, was back in the news yesterday. The infamous Surry County, Va., house that was headquarters for Vick's dogfighting operation, Bad Newz Kennels, was sold this week to a developer who plans to auction it off. So, are you looking for new digs and don't care about bad karma? There's a public showing of the house, a 4,300-square-foot two-story white brick building with a backyard basketball court, Dec. 8-9. The auction is Dec. 15. No word on what the developer paid, but reportedly, it's less than the $747,000 assessed value.

A federal jury convicted a former Honda Motor Co. official yesterday of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying in a sworn statement to a judge presiding over a bribery suit against the company.In the statement, Gregory T. Savoy, 31, of Cherry Hill, N.J., swore that no one had ever instructed him to discriminate against Honda dealerships that were suing company executives. The jurors, who during the trial listened to a secret tape recording of Savoy, found that he lied."Mr. Savoy was not true to the oath that he took," Assistant U.S. Attorney Dale P. Kelberman said in closing arguments in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.

WASHINGTON -- A parade of House prosecutors staged a four-hour tutorial yesterday on the laws of perjury and obstruction of justice, hoping to persuade 100 silent senators that the offenses committed by President Clinton were grave enough to merit his removal from office.In a sometimes repetitive proceeding, four House Republicans insisted that the evidence against the president overwhelmingly proves the two articles of impeachment approved by the House in December.The prosecutors went on to argue that the evidence is so weighty that it shows Clinton guilty also of some charges the House did not approve or even consider, such as witness tampering or perjury in his deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones lawsuit.

WASHINGTON -- With 100 senators sitting in silent attention, House prosecutors opened their case yesterday against William Jefferson Clinton, charging that he had "piled perjury upon perjury," engaged in a "multifacted scheme to obstruct justice" and should be removed from the office of the presidency."

Excerpts from yesterday's closing arguments in the impeachment trial against President Clinton, as transcribed by the Federal Document Clearing House:Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin RepublicanThe news media characterizes the managers as 13 angry men. They are right in that we are angry, but they are dead wrong about what we are angry about. We have not spent long hours poring through the evidence, sacrificed time with our families, and subjected ourselves to intense political criticism to further a political vendetta.

LOOKING A little more serious, isn't it? Chief justice swearing in senators as jurors. Henry Hyde delivering impeachment papers. Somber newscasters referring to the president by his full name, including the middle one. No sign of the president admitting to perjury. And yet, a lot of Americans probably believe this thing, now in the hands of the grown-ups, is going to end next week in some sort of wrist slap.Two-thirds of the 100 senators - there are 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats - must vote to convict Bill Clinton if he is to be removed from office.

WASHINGTON -- The names of the players are all too well-known. The charges of perjury and obstruction of justice may have a familiar ring.But when White House spokesman Joe Lockhart complained last week that the details of President Clinton's defense had received scant public attention, he had a point: The nuts and bolts of the case against William Jefferson Clinton remain a mystery to most Americans, obscured by partisan politics and buried by the fast-moving...

LONDON -- Every spring about this time the popular British historian Paul Johnson holds a garden party at his London home. At this year's party -- like all of his parties -- the mix of politicians, intellectuals and business people is unlike anything one would come upon in the United States. Political Correctitude is not yet a religion here.At Mr. Johnson's party, there are apt to be people from the left such as the playwright Harold Pinter and Lord and Lady Longford. They are now war resisters.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon could have two separate criminal trials, defense attorneys announced yesterday, saying that the theft and perjury indictments will not be combined. Dixon's defense attorney, Arnold M. Weiner, would not say why the trials will be separated and called the announcement "everyone's decision." State Prosecutor Robert A. Rohrbaugh said the decision rested with the defense and would not affect the way he tries the cases. Dixon's trial on charges that she stole gift cards from needy families will go forward on Nov. 9. No date has been set for the perjury trial.

Lawyers for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon will not ask a judge to jettison the theft charges against her but did file a 29-page motion on Friday requesting again that the perjury charges be dismissed. Judge Dennis M. Sweeney ruled in May that similar perjury charges against the mayor could not stand because they were brought using tainted evidence that violate her legislative immunity. Now, the judge will be asked to determine how broadly that immunity is defined. Dixon has been charged with two counts of perjury for failing to report gifts from developer Ronald Lipscomb on her city ethics form.

Lawyers for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon continued a legal quarrel with state prosecutors and filed new papers Tuesday aimed at forcing the state to turn over all grand jury subpoenas issued since January when the mayor was first charged with perjury and theft. Dixon attorney Dale P. Kelberman wrote in a court filing that he needs to review the subpoenas in order to prevent "possible injustice" in the case and called the state prosecutors' arguments for withholding the information "a combination of confusion, obfuscation and irrelevancy."

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon may have felt victorious Thursday when several of the criminal charges she faces were tossed out by Circuit Judge Dennis M. Sweeney. The ruling may reduce her legal exposure, but she is by no means vindicated. Beyond the legal technicalities and political spin, here's what Baltimore citizens should remember: Ms. Dixon is accused of accepting thousands of dollars in gifts and travel from a developer whose projects received millions in city tax breaks - gifts that she failed to report on her ethics forms.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon won a significant legal victory Thursday when a Circuit Court judge dismissed four perjury charges and one misconduct charge against her, saying they were based on improper evidence. Dixon still faces seven other criminal charges, including theft. The judge, retired Howard County Circuit Court Judge Dennis M. Sweeney, also dropped all criminal charges in a separate case against City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton, who had been indicted for bribery. Dixon declined comment, telling reporters at an afternoon event in Canton, "You can talk to Arnold Weiner, my attorney."

Woods says he'll return next week at Match Play golf Eight months after winning the U.S. Open on one good leg, a healthy Tiger Woods is returning to golf. Woods said on his Web site yesterday that he will defend his title next week in the Accenture Match Play Championship, believing his reconstructed left knee and his game are good enough to win. "I'm now ready to play again," Woods said. The Match Play Championship begins Wednesday in Tucson, Ariz., where Woods will end his 253-day break from competition.

Roger Clemens had to know it would come to this. He had to know his high-stakes game of chicken with steroid investigator George Mitchell and the steroid grandstanders in Congress would end with a perjury investigation and maybe a federal indictment. He had to know it because any first-year law school student could have told him so, and most assuredly his high-priced legal team laid out the whole thing right from the beginning. Which means this might have been part of the plan all along.

A question that lingers after Wednesday's mostly frustrating congressional committee steroid hearing is what is the public appetite - or even tolerance level - for a continued exploration of who is telling the truth in the Roger Clemens case. Not that I'm suggesting there's anything that can be done to make it go away or even that it should go away. In the end, there are federal law-enforcement types out there who will determine whether there is more to be examined here - the operative word being perjury.

Roger Clemens has played out his hand in the sad steroid saga that has - no doubt - permanently stained his great career. Now, all that's left for him to do is move on and hope he has done enough to erode the credibility of former personal trainer Brian McNamee and discourage the Justice Department from pursuing a perjury case. So why is attorney Rusty Hardin still on the offensive when there's nothing left to gain and so much still at risk? That's a question that's still rattling around in my head after reading his comments blasting California Congressman Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House committee that grilled Clemens and McNamee for nearly five hours Wednesday in Washington.

Drawing a distinction between a police firearms expert's perjured testimony about his education and his analysis of bullet fragments that linked a former Baltimore police sergeant to a 1993 murder, a Baltimore County judge ruled yesterday that James A. Kulbicki should not receive a new trial. In ruling on the case - the first to include longtime ballistics expert Joseph Kopera's falsified credentials as part of a challenge to a defendant's conviction - Circuit Judge Kathleen G. Cox found that Kopera had repeatedly committed perjury in courtrooms across Maryland in testifying to college degrees that he never earned.