LOS ANGELES – Michael Jackson spent his final days in a sleep-deprived haze of medication and misery until succumbing to a fatal dose of potent drugs given to him by the private physician he had hired to act as his personal pharmaceutical dispensary, a jury decided yesterday.
The verdict, nearly 2½ years after the star’s death, came after nearly 50 witnesses, 22 days of testimony and less than two days of deliberation by a jury of seven men and five women.
Murray now faces up to four years in prison and the loss of his medical licence. A Houston cardiologist, he was paid $150,000 (€109,000) a month to work as Jackson’s personal physician as the singer rehearsed in Los Angeles for This Is It, a series of 50 sold-out concerts in London that he needed to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in mounting debts.
Testimony during the trial showed that Murray had stayed with Jackson at least six nights a week and was regularly asked – and sometimes begged – by the singer to give him drugs powerful enough to put him to sleep. Jackson, Murray told authorities, was especially eager to be administered propofol, a surgical anaesthetic that put him to sleep when other powerful sedatives could not. Testimony indicated that propofol, in conjunction with other drugs in the singer’s system, had played the key role in his death on June 25th, 2009.
Prosecutors tried to paint Murray as a money-hungry physician who would do things no reputable doctor would do – including improperly and recklessly administering an anaesthetic normally given only in a hospital. The full retinue of drugs given to Jackson while he was under Murray’s care was so beyond normal practice, prosecutors said, that it amounted to a “pharmaceutical experiment”. For its part, the defence tried to portray Jackson as a man so desperate to make his comeback concerts a success that he was willing to take wild chances and grew terrified that he would not be able to perform to his own exacting standards without more rest and less stress.
“He tried to close his eyes, and nothing would work,” Murray told investigators in 2009, saying that Jackson worried openly about not satisfying his fans. “He complained: ‘I’ve got to sleep, Dr Conrad. I have these rehearsals to perform’.”
The morning Jackson died, Murray told investigators during a recording played in state superior court, the singer told him, “Just make me sleep, it doesn’t matter what happens”.
Murray told investigators two days after Jackson’s death that he had been using propofol almost every night for the previous two months to help the singer sleep. He said that he had been trying to wean Jackson off the drug, but prosecutors pointed out that the doctor had ordered large amounts of the drug just days before Jackson’s death.
In their closing arguments, prosecutors repeatedly invoked Jackson’s three children to a jury that included nine parents, saying that the singer wanted to perform, in part, so that they could see their father on stage. David Walgren, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case, described the frantic moments after Murray realized that Jackson was not responsive and as the pop star’s children watched him lie lifeless on his bed.
Since his death, Jackson's estate, managed by his former lawyer and a record executive with longtime ties to the Jackson family, has prospered, generating more than $310 million and paying off most of the singer's debts. – ( New York TimesService)