CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair.

How do you save someone determined to destroy himself?

That question will surely be in the mind of most jurors who will ultimately decide the personal and professional fate of Dr. Conrad Murray, a Houston cardiologist, who was formally charged on February 8, 2010 with involuntary manslaughter in Los Angeles in connection with Michael Jackson’s death. Murray was the superstar’s personal physician last June when he administered the powerful anesthetic propofol and two sedatives to help Jackson, a renowned insomniac, get some sleep. The sleep aids put the pop singer to sleep permanently.

Michael Jackson was an exceedingly complex individual. His life was a tragic chronicle of drug use and abuse. He did things to his own life (and to the lives of others) that would have destroyed most other mere mortals. Despite a host of admirable personal qualities and an immeasurable amount of professional talent, he was a living portrait of self-destruction. He had been warned on several occasions about the dangers of using propofol. It is one of the most powerful and dangerous drugs that can be administered to the human body outside a very tightly-controlled medical environment. Jackson was still willing to risk his life on a regular basis by taking the drug because it helped him sleep when, in actuality, it didn’t help him sleep; it simply rendered him unconscious.

Dr. Conrad Murray was born to a poor single mother nearly 57 years ago in Grenada, a small Caribbean island made famous by former President Ronald Reagan’s military invasion of it in 1983 called Operation Urgent Fury. He lived with his grandparents on the island until he was seven when his mother returned and took him with her to Trinidad where she had gone shortly after the boy’s birth in search of work. Despite being reared in a drug-infested and crime-plagued area of Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, young Murray resisted all the temptations of crime and drugs to become well-known as an honest and responsible person in the neighborhood.

Citing the British tabloid, The Daily Mall, the Houston Chronicle reported recently that as a young boy Murray went into a store where he found a woman had left her bag. He took the bag and after he got home, the young boy found it contained $3100. He searched for and found the owner of the bag and returned the money to her, according former neighbor Krishndath Saroop. Murray went on to graduate from high school on the small island after which he worked hard at a number of jobs, including an elementary school teacher, before saving enough money to pay for his education in the United States.

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