According to a report by ESPN.com, Roger Clemens was offered a plea agreement but his attorney Rusty Hardin said that his client declined the offer.
“The government made a recommendation [for a plea agreement] and we declined,” Hardin said. “I will tell you the recommendation they made was a very good one if he was guilty. And if he was guilty we would have jumped on it. Everybody has all this great solicitous advice, all the media and you guys — ESPN. Nobody is answering the question: What if he didn’t do it, what should he have done? And everybody wants him to confess.
“I have even heard people suggest that even if he didn’t do it he should have said he did so that everybody will move on. That is a helluva commentary.”
Hardin reiterated he and his staff have drilled Clemens on the need to fess up, if he did steroids or human growth hormone.
“He’s been told from the beginning if he did it he ought to do exactly what Andy [Pettitte] did. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that. And everybody assumes it is his arrogance and his ego that kept him from doing it.
“He wasn’t the greatest witness before Congress, I understand that. But I got to tell you, we’ve sat on him probably for 100 of our hours over the last two-and-a-half years, always with the same thing: ‘If you did it, the best thing to do is just admit it and move on and we’ll deal with it.’ He has never, ever wavered.”
Talk about rolling the dice. If he’s guilty and he didn’t accept this deal when he had the chance, then he’s absolutely out of his mind. The government has essentially given him a nice out and he decided not to take it, so he’s either truly innocent or clinically insane.
I will give Clemens this – he has maintained his innocence throughout this whole ordeal. He’s never wavered in his denial about talking steroids and obviously he’s willing to go to extreme measures to prove his innocence. One would think that if he were guilty, he would have taken the deal and then faced the public scrutiny to avoid jail time.
Of course, I wouldn’t put it past Clemens to go to jail and maintain his innocence, rather than accept a plea agreement and admit that he’s been lying this entire time. Even if he’s proven guilty in the court of law, he could continue to tell the public that he never juiced and that he was screwed by the judicial system.
What a mess.
