Pop star

I believe I've mentioned getting caught up in the Conrad Murray trial a little. It's a fascinating workshop on the concepts of blame and responsibility:

Dr. Paul White said he believes after Michael Jackson was given a dose of propofol by Conrad Murray in the early morning hours of the day he died that the pop star took lorazepam pills on his own later that morning.

That would explain the levels of drugs found in Jackson's system in the autopsy, and is at the center of the defense's efforts to show Murray did not administer a fatal dose of drugs to Jackson.

The more we learn from the witnesses, the bigger jerk Murray seems. I don't think there's more than a handful of people who wouldn't hold him in large part morally responsible for Michael Jackson's death. He accepted more than $1 million a year to take care of just one patient, and so many of the actions he took fell outside the boundaries of accepted medical behavior that he ought to be drummed out of the business for sheer incompetence. And it doesn't exactly exonerate him to show that Jackson might have been a drug-addled addict who couldn't control himself. People providing the level of care Murray was supposed to be providing have to try to protect their patients from their worst impulses, not indulge them.

But . . . (and maybe a lawyer could tell me whether this is a big 'but' or not) . . .

He's not on trial for being a jerk or having moral culpability in Jackson's death. He isn't even on trial for providing easy access to the powerful drug that ended up killing him. As I understand it, the prosecution very specifically contends that Murray administered the fatal dose to Jackson, so, as a juror, if I had a reasonable doubt that he so acted, I'd have to find him not guilty, no matter my feelings on his general unworthiness as a human being.