I’m sure you will have been fol­low­ing, as I have, the events fol­low­ing the death of pop’s greatest icon, Michael Jack­son and the sub­sequent trial of his car­di­olo­gist for mis­con­duct in allow­ing the singer to ingest a lethal amount of pain-killers as a sleep­ing aid. If con­victed of invol­un­tary man­slaughter Dr Con­rad Mur­ray could face 4 years in jail in addi­tion to the loss of his med­ical license. All of which is, as they say, fair enough. If Mur­ray did indeed admin­is­ter the lethal dose then he should be pun­ished by whatever means the Amer­ican judi­cial court deems necessary.

What is, how­ever, com­pletely unne­ces­sary is the cluster of half-soaked, whitewash-brained mor­ons who have con­verged around the courts with the inten­tion of hound­ing Con­rad Mur­ray with cries of “mur­derer” and “mon­ster”. I saw a video of Mur­ray arriv­ing at court and was hor­ri­fied by the abuse he had to put up with dur­ing the short walk from the car to the front door. Any­one with enough brains to put their shoes on the right feet will real­ise that Mur­ray was a close friend of Michael’s who has undoubtedly been hit as hard as any­one else by his untimely death. If it was his fault, then it doesn’t need to be said that he made a ter­rible mis­take, but he did NOT murder him, des­pite the best attempts of the corn-circle soci­ety to claim otherwise.

This is what really gets on my nerves about these situ­ations; the imme­di­ate and incess­ant fin­ger point­ing, the unquench­able need to find a scape­goat and witch-hunt them into sub­mis­sion. And it ALWAYS hap­pens when someone as fam­ous and as widely-loved as Michael passes away. Bruce Lee for example, was appar­ently not killed by pre­scrip­tion med­ic­a­tion, but in some weird con­spir­acy involving mar­tial arts mas­ters who took excep­tion to his teach­ing Kung Fu to west­ern act­ors. Kurt Cobain, des­pite a col­our­ful his­tory of heroin abuse and sui­cide attempts, allegedly has his brains blown out instead by his wife Court­ney Love, in a mad attempt to squeeze some extra cash out of him. And Elvis, well he’s not even dead. Yeah, right.

This is a prob­lem when a celebrity’s fame reaches crit­ical level. Fans become so in awe, so enam­oured that that their idol becomes, in their eyes, almost immor­tal; a celes­tial demi-god far above the mantle of the bottom-feeding masses. So when the star even­tu­ally bites the dust they can’t take it. It’s impossible for them to believe that their star is in fact human just like them, as equally sus­cept­ible to over­dose, buck­shot or toilet-induced heart attack as they are. And so they point fin­gers, they demand answers, and if there aren’t any then they make up a few of their own. Some unbe­liev­ably can’t even func­tion without the pres­ence of their idol. We’ve all seen the tear­ful rant­ings of pitiful-excuse-for-a-whining-web-wimp Chris Crocker defend­ing Brit­ney Spears, and when Take That split up in 1996 a sui­cide hot­line had to be set up. I mean, how pathetic is that?

And yet, this is the dir­ec­tion in which our celeb-obsessed soci­ety seems to be head­ing and why these idi­ots won’t rest until they see Con­rad Mur­ray hanged.

What you need to remem­ber is that this man was the per­sonal doc­tor to one of the richest and most suc­cess­ful pop stars of all time. This was not just a reg­u­lar patient who would take a pre­scrip­tion and shuffle off to the phar­macy, this was a man who could afford the best doc­tors money could buy. It was no secret that MJ was addicted to paink­illers fol­low­ing his acci­dent whilst film­ing the Pepsi com­mer­cial, so think about it — if the man who pays your wages and puts your kids through col­lege asks you for a bit more medi­cine, you give it to him; if not, he’ll simply find a doc­tor who will. I am by no means try­ing to jus­tify what Mur­ray may or may not have done, but he is being tried for man­slaughter, not murder. The man is inno­cent until proven guilty and own­ing a sub­scrip­tion to the Michael Jack­son fan club and a dodgy hair­cut doesn’t appoint you judge and jury. We live in a civ­il­ised soci­ety where every­one is entitled to a fair and unbiased trial, and any­one bone-headed enough to con­demn a man without full pos­ses­sion of the facts deserves a bet­ter view of the courts, from the dock. So my advice to any of these would-be Jacko-Wackos is this:

Put the plac­ard down. Go home. Get a life.