Day 16 of the Trial: Defense Lawyers Began Their Case

Yesterday, after 4 weeks of proceedings and the calling of 33 witnesses, the prosecutor handed the case over to Conrad Murray’s defense attorneys so they could also call their own witnesses to the stand.

Before that, the defense attorneys, as is customary, asked the judge to end the trial by issuing a direct acquittal order. The judge rejected their request and said the decision was up to the jury. The defense did not object to that ruling.

One of yesterday’s witnesses was Allan Metzger, Michael’s former doctor. He said that two months before Michael’s death, Michael had asked him to inject him with an anesthetic medication. Metzger said he had warned Michael about the danger of doing that.

Metzger, who had been Michael’s friend and doctor for two decades, said that since 15 years ago he had known Michael had trouble sleeping. He said that during a phone call to Michael’s home on April 18, 2009, the King of Pop had asked him to treat him by injecting him with medications. Metzger recalled that Michael had never mentioned the name of any specific drug.

Metzger said he had prescribed an oral medication for Michael, and Michael told him he knew the oral drug had no effect on him. Michael told Metzger he wanted an anesthetic.

At that moment, the prosecutor used the opportunity to show that another doctor had also rejected Michael’s request for an unreasonable medication. As their previous witness, Professor Schaeffer, had stated in court, a doctor’s job is not to follow a patient’s orders.

Prosecutor David Walgren: “You explained to him that injecting an anesthetic drug is dangerous and should not be done in a place outside a hospital. Is that correct?”

Metzger confirmed this and added that there was no fortune in the world that could make him risk Michael’s life by giving him an anesthetic (propofol).

The next witness was nurse Cherilyn Lee. She said that before Michael died, she had treated him with vitamins. She said that after that, Michael’s condition improved, and even invited her to go with him to London for his new tour.

Lee said that Michael then told her he couldn’t sleep and asked her to go back to her home and help him.

This nurse said that at first she thought the insomnia problem was caused by drinking beverages containing a lot of caffeine. She said she removed caffeine from her daily routine, but nothing changed.

She told Michael that he should see a specialist so his sleep process could be tested. Michael’s response was that he didn’t have time for that.

In mid-April 2009, just before starting propofol treatment for insomnia with Dr. Murray, Michael had asked Cherilyn to go to his home and monitor his sleep. Cherilyn said she slept for 5 hours, and when she woke up, Michael was nervous because he hadn’t been able to sleep more.

“He said, ‘See? I can’t sleep more.’”

After Michael’s death in June 2009, Lee told a news agency in an interview that Michael had asked her for propofol, but she had refused his request. It is expected that in the upcoming session, Lee will testify about this.

Steven Shaffer also took the stand for the fifth day, but the passing days and the defense attorney’s questions did not create any disruption in his testimony or the consistency of his statements.

With confidence, Shaffer said that Conrad Murray was the only person who bore the weight of Michael’s death. He called the doctor careless and inattentive, and said that in his confusion and clumsiness, he didn’t know how to give his patient artificial respiration.

Yesterday, four other witnesses were also called to the stand. Two police officers who had questioned Murray and Cherilyn Lee, a 911 call recording specialist, and a specialist in closed-circuit cameras.

In court, it was said that after Michael died, the closed-circuit video footage from the day of his death was erased by the police, because they didn’t think they were dealing with a criminal case.

Yesterday, pieces of that footage—showing the last time Michael’s car entered his home at 12:45 a.m. on June 25, the day he died—were shown in court. The rest of the video has been lost forever, and it is not known who came and went at Michael’s home at the time of his death.

The lawyers wanted to see all 24 hours of the video, but its contents are gone forever because something else was recorded over it.

Source: eMJey.com / AP / CNN