The Michael Jackson’s wrongful death trial ended yesterday when the Judge issued his sentence. The Judge handed down a four year (maximum) sentence to Conrad Murray and then added insult to injury with a scolding from the bench. Only in LA.
The whole trial atmosphere and the findings are surreal. It revealed a world where by day Jackson prepared for a new road show and by night was incapacitated with high tech drugs administered by a private doctor. Jackson lived in a rented home with his three adopted children yet no one thought to seek State child protection.
Jackson’s family attended the sentencing looking politically correct with words of “justice has been served”. What type of a family would have let their son live like this without some type of intervention?
Los Angeles, of course, did not disappoint the media. In a county and a State where there is not enough prison space to house all those convicted for their entire sentence and no money to build more, LA found the money to put on a show trial where the verdict means nothing.
Undoubtably Jackson was a willing participant. Equally clear, the good doctor Murray was both incompetent and uncaring in administering such powerful drugs in a private home. Murray also trashed his credibility by not reporting Jackson to State mental health officials as well as State child care authorities. It is tough today to make a buck.
All the major television networks and tabloid newspapers have had an advertising field day reporting this sick story. How any serious news media outlet could justify putting reports on the trial’s progress in the same newscast as news about the Arab Spring, seems inexplicable. But these days making a buck is not so easy.
Hopefully America has heard the last of Dr Murray and Michael Jackson.
I just wonder what might have happened had Wall Street been located in Los Angeles? Would the mortgage companies, big banks, and investment firms’ executives who gamed the system and nearly bankrupt the nation while looting pension funds and average Americans have been tried?
I’m not sure it would have happened since LA likes LOL.
Regaining the Center 