Paula Canny, the San Francisco attorney who has represented Bonds' former trainer Greg Anderson, said that the decision means that even if there is smoking-gun evidence in the records, it will never be admissible in courts unless it relates to players originally named in search warrants drafted in 2004.
"It means," Canny said, "that if they got Roger Clemens' urine sample, they can't use it. If they got Miguel Tejada's urine sample, they can't use it. None of it (beyond 10 players named on search warrants) is admissible."
The case, now closed, became a forum for debates on privacy protection in the digital age, the scope of baseball's drug problem and the methods of the government's point man on the steroid war, Food and Drug Administration criminal investigator Jeff Novitzky.
Canny, whose client has been jailed several times for refusing to testify about Bonds, said that the case "affects every single American" by reinforcing limits on what federal agents can do as they move into realms that citizens may consider private. She said the solicitor general's decision not to appeal to the Supreme Court was "an appropriate concession by the government of the wrongdoing of their agent.
"What this means is the government, when they go to search an entity, and there's probable cause to search Person X, it doesn't mean that they can take Person Y or Person Z's stuff too," said Canny. "They shouldn't appeal, because No. 1, they'll lose. And No. 2, what they did was wrong. It's nice that they conceded their wrongdoing."
