Pity poor Dr Conrad Murray, the American cardiologist on trial in Los Angeles for causing the death of pop star Michael Jackson in June 2009 without really meaning to do so. Murray is charged with involuntary manslaughter — what would be called culpable homicide in this country.

His trial is drawing to a close as the prosecution and defence lawyers begin their closing arguments today. After that, it will be left to the jury to decide his fate.

When he hasn’t been looking tearful during the trial, the good doctor has seemed decidedly doleful. And well he might, because if OJ Simpson was blessed with a dream defence team, Murray appears to have been cursed with a nightmare one.

His team of lawyers has been weak, to say the least, and responsible for dreaming up what may very well be a terminally ill defence.

One legal analyst described it as the “soddi” defence: some other dude did it.

Dr Conrad Murray and defence attorney Ed Chernoff listen during the final stage of Murray's defence during his involuntary manslaughter trial in the death of Michael Jackson at the Los Angeles Superior Court. Photo: Reuters

In this case, the other dude was supposed to be Jackson himself. When Murray wasn’t looking, the star supposedly injected himself with a lethal dose of propofol — the anaesthetic drug Murray had already given him the night he died, and many nights before that — along with a cocktail of all sorts of other powerful opioid drugs and tranquillisers to help him sleep.

The only wonder is that Jackson lasted as long as he did, with such a hideously dangerous cocktail of drugs inside him.

The defence hasn’t denied that Murray displayed negligence in giving Jackson propofol, a drug all the expert witnesses have said over and over again should never be used except in a hospital setting, with all the essential monitoring and resuscitative equipment at hand should something go horribly wrong — which it did in this case.

Murray’s lawyers also tried hard — and failed miserably — to suggest there was another dude: the Los Angeles-based dermatologist who plied the singer with powerful doses of the painkiller Demerol every time he injected fillers into Jackson’s face. (The problem was there was no Demerol in Jackson’s body at autopsy, but the defence plugged away with that suggestion.)

If that wasn’t bad enough, Murray’s lawyers have been squabbling among themselves. One of them, Ed Chernoff, was staying with another, J Michael Flanagan, apparently to save Murray some of the costs of his accommodation, but left the house in a huff after an argument. According to media reports, Flanagan was having a hissy fit because he had been taken off the cross-examination of a witness.

I can believe that, as the silver-haired Flanagan was at times so ponderous and slow in his demeanour and questioning, it made you wonder if he was on propofol.

Chernoff didn’t help things with acting at times in court like a petulant hillbilly adolescent when prosecution witnesses said things he didn’t like.

Prosecution lawyers, on the other hand, have looked super-smart and sharp, focused and energetic, as if they were snacking on omega-rich brain food during court recesses.

Deputy district attorney David Walgren was a legal juggernaut throughout, decimating defence witnesses. Included in that destructive path was the defence’s much-hyped and only real “star” witness, Dr Paul White, a world-renowned professor of anaesthetics, or anaesthesiology.

With embarrassing ease, Walgren turned White into a “Trojan horse”, as one analyst put it, against the defence team’s client.

White’s unprofessional and childish antics in the courtroom also destroyed any remaining lustre he may have had as a brilliant academic. It’s an understatement to say he didn’t acquit himself well as a witness for the defence. He was accused of (and denied) stage-whispering insults at a prosecution witness, Dr Stephen Shafer, another distinguished expert in the same field who just happens to be a former colleague and student of White.

The presiding judge admonished White for trying to slip in evidence in Murray’s favour that the court had already ruled was inadmissible. White continued to try, until the judge slapped him with a $1000 fine.

White told the court he was reluctant at first to be a witness for the defence in this case, and really only agreed after his wife urged him to do so. He must be rueing that decision — almost as much as Murray must be rueing his choice of defence lawyers.

With the courtroom “friends” Murray chose to support him in court, he had no need of any enemies.

Tags: Conrad Murray, court, Michael Jackson, United States