LOS ANGELES (AP) — Now that the federal government has closed its investigation of Lance Armstrong, some legal experts are wondering whether the effort to prosecute superstar athletes over doping claims is worth it.
On Friday, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles said Armstrong would not be charged after a two-year probe into accusations that the seven-time Tour de France winner and his teammates systematically used performance-enhancing drugs to prepare for races.
"This is an example where prosecutors are out scouring the countryside to bring charges against a high-profile athlete," said defense attorney Mark Werksman, a former federal prosecutor. "It's disturbing that they contort and stretch to find a crime. It's an abuse of federal power. It's wrong."
The Armstrong investigation follows the trial of Barry Bonds last year in which Major League Baseball's home run king was convicted of just one charge and sentenced to 30 days home confinement at his estate in Beverly Hills.
Prosecutors' first attempt to convict star pitcher Roger Clemens ended in a mistrial, so they're preparing for another attempt in two months.
The 40-year-old Armstrong maintains he has never failed a drug test, but he nonetheless became the focus of investigators' attention after former teammate Floyd Landis accused him in 2010 of participating in a doping program.
Finally, however, prosecutors decided not to press their case.
Prosecutors missed on two other recent occasions, when the goal was landing a major conviction against superstars. Bonds was found guilty of obstruction of justice and sentenced in December to home detention, but jurors deadlocked on whether he lied to a grand jury when he denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs.
The steroids case against Clemens became derailed last summer after a judge declared a mistrial when prosecutors showed jurors inadmissible evidence. The trial is now set for April 17.
The investigations into Bonds, Clemens and Armstrong had a larger context — an effort to clean up professional sports that had been dirtied by positive drug tests and admissions from some athletes that they had taken banned drugs.
The most famous of these investigations involved the notorious Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, a steroids ring operating just outside San Francisco. And while the sentences were relatively light, the federal probe did result in 11 convictions — including Bonds' — and helped spark stronger anti-drug efforts in MLB.
"One of the lessons of the Bonds case is that juries do not like to convict professional athletes who they hold as heroes," said Mathew Rosengart, also a former federal prosecutor. "To the government's credit, they used their discretion wisely."
In rendering his decision on Friday, U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr. said in a statement that his office was closing an investigation that looked at potential criminal conduct by members and associates of a racing team owned in part by Armstrong, indicating Armstrong wasn't the only one who could have faced charges.
Yet some observers believe that, in making their decision to drop the Armstrong case, prosecutors felt it would be too difficult to gain a conviction against someone admired not only as a competitor but the face of the cancer charity Livestrong.
The challenge facing prosecutors was to determine if Armstrong and other team members violated federal conspiracy, fraud or racketeering charges. Investigators looked at whether a doping program was established for Armstrong's team while, at least part of the time, it received government sponsorship from the U.S. Postal Service.
At the center of the investigation was federal agent Jeff Novitzky, who also helped bring the charges against Bonds and Clemens and has been criticized for targeting athletes and wasting taxpayer dollars.
"The enormous bill for this fruitless trophy hunting expedition led by agent Jeff Novitzky needs to be totaled up and those responsible should be held accountable," said Victor Conte, the BALCO founder and president, who spent four months in prison after pleading guilty to steroids distribution. "Especially in this economic crisis it's important to make the highest use of the available tax dollars and that certainly does not seem to be the case with this investigation."
Indeed, the government spent plenty of time and resources investigating Armstrong. Federal prosecutors traveled to Europe and met with foreign officials and they called some of Armstrong's former teammates and associates to testify before a grand jury in Los Angeles.
Government officials declined to say how much money was spent on the Armstrong probe.
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