Re: Paul Aiton : Mon Nov 17, 2014 2:08 pm  

That's my point.

The players who were offered the sweetheart deal to plead guilty and take their punishment had nothing to fight. If Aiton and Pomeroy aren't going to get the same deal, there's more incentive for them to put the burden of proof back on the ASADA.

Re: Paul Aiton : Tue Nov 18, 2014 12:42 pm  

What I'm unclear about in this farrago is whether Aiton has ever had a doping test that's shown he's taken any banned substance.
If he hasn't, surely they have no proof that would stand up in a court of law?
Guilty without trial or even evidence it would seem to me which cannot be equitable?

Re: Paul Aiton : Tue Nov 18, 2014 1:46 pm  

Old Feller wrote:

What I'm unclear about in this farrago is whether Aiton has ever had a doping test that's shown he's taken any banned substance.
If he hasn't, surely they have no proof that would stand up in a court of law?
Guilty without trial or even evidence it would seem to me which cannot be equitable?

From what I understand - and excuse any gaps/inaccuracies...

It all comes out of an Australian Crime Commission report into drug use in sport, which identified a guy called Stephen Dank as supplying and administering banned peptides at Cronulla and an AFL team (Essendon I think) in 2011.

The evidence Dank gave the ACC is inadmissible in court, as it was obtained under threat of a jail term if he refused to comply and he has to date refused to co-operate with either the ASADA or NRL.

Hence the players involved being given the option of taking a back-dated ban (which in real terms amounts to three games) in return for an admission of guilt despite never having failed a test.

If a player did decide to take it to court, then AFAIK ASADA would have to show that they have evidence of a banned substance being administered, obtained from somewhere other than Dank's evidence to the ACC. Have they got it? Who knows, but if the alternative is a two-year ban I'd be willing to take a punt that they haven't and litigate.

Re: Paul Aiton : Tue Nov 18, 2014 10:41 pm  

There was no physical evidence at all - just paper evidence that players had been injected with something, most likely a banned substance.

The problem with legal routes is that sporting bodies and the government have ceded massive powers to ASADA. ASADA doesn't need to 'prove' anything in court - the burden of proof is on the players.

To successfully take ASADA to court you have to prove that they did something wrong under their process - which as Essendon recently found out is far easier said than done. You can't reverse an ASADA decision by going to court and complaining that their findings or sentencing were wrong.

Altogether its a battle which is - purposely - designed to be almost impossible to win, unless you don't let yourself get injected with dodgy stuff in the first place.

Where I would have thought Aiton and Pomeroy would have a very strong case is if they can show that ASADA never served them with infraction notices at the same time as the other Sharks players, and that as a result they should be given the same deal. The problem is that the 'same deal' would have a bigger impact on any affected players now, because we're already chewing up the off season.

Re: Paul Aiton : Sat Nov 29, 2014 2:03 pm  

Inocent until proven guilty. End of

Re: Paul Aiton : Thu Dec 04, 2014 1:04 am  

That's not the way the drug-testing agencies work. There really is a lack of apparent fairness in the whole process. The reason the process is so stacked against athletes is to stop them using ignorance as a defence. I can understand why this is so - otherwise so long as they swore they didn't know what they took they'd never be busted, even if they knew exactly what they were doing.

The same approach is clearly not taken with respect to criminal offences, but I guess in the anti-doping universe its considered the lesser of two evils - the alternative being to give up on trying to police drug use at all.