Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s personal physician, left the performer alone and under the influence of a powerful anesthetic to make telephone calls the morning the pop singer died, says the Los Angeles Times. By the time he returned, Jackson had stopped breathing. Murray legally acquired the operating room drug propofol from a Las Vegas pharmacy and gave it to Jackson as treatment for insomnia, sources said.
Jackson had been using propofol as a sleep aid on and off for a decade, according to one law enforcement source. Dmitry Gorin, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor, said that to prove involuntary manslaughter, prosecutors would have to show Murray’s conduct was reckless to the point that no reasonable physician would consider such a course of treatment. “They’d use medical experts to show that the lack of monitoring equipment, lack of staff and leaving the room was so beyond the pale of what a professional would do,” Gorin said.
