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Prosecution and defence lay out opening statements on first day of Conrad Murray manslaughter trial in Los Angeles More than two years after Michael Jackson’s death from an overdose of a powerful surgical anaesthetic, the irrepressible circus surrounding the King of Pop was back in full swing as the personal physician who attended to him in his dying hours stood trial for involuntary manslaughter. Fans with gold “MJ” armbands and T-shirts bearing the silkscreen likeness of their idol crammed the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles for a glimpse of courtroom entourage and a shot at one of the few open seats in the public gallery. Bloggers, gossip columnists and news crews were also out in force, just as they were at Jackson’s child molestation trial in 2005 and at the rehearsals for the ill-fated final tour – hauntingly named This Is It – that never took place in 2009. Inside Judge Michael Pastor’s courtroom, lawyers for the prosecution and the defence laid out their opening statements – one asserting that Conrad Murray was single-handedly responsible for Jackson’s death and the other placing the blame squarely on Jackson himself. In attendance were Jackson’s parents, Joe and Katherine, and his magician, Majestic Magnificent. The mood, however, was appropriately sombre. David Walgren, representing the district attorney’s office, offered a brisk narrative using a video monitor with still photographs, charts, extracts from voicemail and other recordings. “The acts and omissions of Michael Jackson’s personal doctor, Conrad Murray, directly led to his premature death at the age of 50,” Walgren said. “He … repeatedly acted with gross negligence, repeaedly denied appropriate care to his patient … it was Dr Murray’s repeated incompetent and unskilled acts that led to Michael Jackon’s death.” Grim photos of Jackson lying dead in a hospital bed were juxtaposed with a picture of the singer rehearsing the day before his death. Walgren offered evidence showing that Murray ordered a staggering 15.5 litres of the surgical anaesthetic propofol in the last two and half months of the singer’s life. Walgren alleged that Murray relied on the drug – which Jackson referred to as his “milk” – to get the singer to sleep every night, even though it has no known application as a sleeping aid, and routinely administered it without monitoring equipment to check Jackson’s response. The prosecutor described how Murray realised he had lost his patient – apparently while he was on the phone to a cocktail waitress he regarded as his girlfriend – on the morning of 25 June 2009. This was just moments after he emailed an insurance agent for Jackson’s upcoming tour and said that press reports of health problems were entirely “fallacious”. Walgren said Murray did not ask his girlfriend, Sade Anding, to call the emergency services. Nor did he ask Jackson’s personal assistant, Michael Williams, when they spoke about 20 minutes later. Instead, according to the prosecutor, Murray said “Mr Jackson had a bad reaction” and urged Williams to come over to the star’s plush hillside mansion right away. When the paramedics who eventually arrived asked Murray what he had given Jackson, he made no mention of propofol. Nor did he mention it to the emergency room team at UCLA Medical Center where Jackson was pronounced dead shortly after. Only two days after Jackson’s death, according to Walgren, did he acknowledge to the police that he had administered the drug – and then said he had injected just 25 mg, diluted with another drug called lidocaine. “The evidence will reveal that much more than 25mg was given to put Michael Jackson to sleep,” Walgren told the jury. Murray himself, crisply dressed in a pale shirt and blue tie, showed no reaction as Walgren painted him as a man willing to abandon his medical responsibilities to earn a lucrative $150,000 per month paycheck. He was equally impassive as Walgren described his activities in the minutes after realising Jackson was dead. The prosecutor characterised him as a man frantic not to be caught. Walgren described how Alberto Alvarez, who also worked for Jackson, came into the upstairs bedroom where Jackson’s lifeless body was laid out on the all-white bed covers and saw Murray administering CPR with one hand. Murray, according to Alvarez’s testimony, told him to grab a bag and started filling it with medicine vials and a saline bag which he told Alvarez to get rid of. Alvarez was also struck by the sight of a catheter running out of Jackson’s penis – a urine-collecting device usually used on patients knocked unconscious for major surgery. A jug of urine sat on a chair, and the jacket and trousers Jackson had worn to a rehearsal the night before lay strewn on the floor. For the defence, Ed Chernoff – from Murray’s home of Houston, Texas – took issue with almost every assertion from Walgren. He alleged that, just before he died, Jackson swallowed eight bottles of a drug called lorazepam, enough to knock out six adults. Chernoff also asserted that Jackson gave himself a dose of propofol on top of that, while Murray was out of the room, creating a “perfect storm in his body that killed him instantly”. “There was no CPR, no doctor, no paramedic, no machine that was going to revive Michael Jackson,” Chernoff said. “He died so rapidly, so instantly, he didn’t have time to close his eyes.” In contrast to the prosecution’s presentation, with its reliance on documents and charts, Chernoff appeared to be in the realm of plausible scenarios rather than verifiable fact. He offered just one low-tech card on an easel, with two questions written on it: “How did Michael Jackson get to the point?” and “What happened when Dr Murray was out of the room?” Unfortunately for him, the “Michael” in Michael Jackson was spelled wrong. United States Michael Jackson Michael Jackson trial Andrew Gumbel guardian.co.uk