I try not to pay to much atention to sensational trials, but I confess to getting a little caught up in the Conrad Murray case. Even granting that Michael Jackson bore the primary responsibility for Michael Jackson's behavior, Murray comes across as an incredible sleazeball (or "person of low character" as I heard one commentator call him). He was paid more than $1 million a year to look after just one patient, and he was so busy using Jackson to impress bedable women that he couldn't even handle that:
So I boil this down to an ethics-class conundrum: You're a doctor. You're offered a chance to make $150,000 a month to look after one patient. You know the patient is a reclusive genius with tastes that are difficult to satisfy (and whatever the outcome, I'm pretty sure it was Jackson, not Murray, who initially suggested using propofol or "milk" as a get-through-the-day medication). In fact, given the eccentric nature of your patient, there's a very strong probability that the job will end unhappily and with considerable risk to your ability to practice medicine in the United States in the future. But in the meantime you can make bank for as long as you keep him alive — and despite his many personal oddities (which include having dismissed some previous doctors for unclear reasons), the patient has no life-threatening ailments. Do you take the job?
One effect the trial is having on me is to rethink my opinion of Jackson. I was one of the many who saw him as either a depraved pervert or an eccentric loony or both. But the picture of him emerging from this trial is of a desperately lonely man who was always trying to capture the youth he never had.
