The single word, “Guilty,” brought a muffled shriek in the gallery of the packed courtroom and tears from Michael Jackson’s family, but no reaction from the doctor convicted of supplying the King of Pop with the drug he craved for sleep.
With the snap of handcuffs, another chapter in the bizarre saga surrounding Jackson’s life came to a close, and the man who once envisioned a glamorous career as the music icon’s personal physician was led from the courtroom. Dr. Conrad Murray was going to jail for involuntary manslaughter.
Murray’s face was grim but betrayed no emotion. In a few minutes, his life had been shattered and it was likely he would never practice medicine again.
It was a precipitous fall for a man who told his patients he had been given “a once in a lifetime opportunity” for which he was giving up his practice. At 58, he planned to devote himself to one patient, Jackson, who would escort him into a world of glamor and celebrity. They were going to London for Jackson’s spectacular comeback concerts.
All of that ended on June 25, 2009, in a Holmby Hills mansion where he gave his difficult patient what he wanted — an operating room anesthetic that Jackson called his “milk,” the only thing the singer trusted to put him to sleep.
Now Murray faces up to four years in prison, although overcrowding makes it unlikely he’ll serve that long.
Jurors heard hours of testimony about propofol, the drug that killed Jackson, and they listened while defense attorneys blamed the singer for his own death, suggesting it was he, not Murray, who injected the fatal dose.
Did they believe that? Jurors weren’t saying. In fact, they said nothing after their verdict. But they didn’t have to find that Murray administered the dose that killed Jackson, only that the doctor was primarily responsible for the singer’s death.
Their deliberations were short, less than nine hours over two days, presided over by the foreman, a 45-year-old management consultant who had previously been a classical musician and had served on a jury before.
