Are there any lessons to be learned from the Conrad Murray conviction? I am pretty sure that most of you aren’t pumping a mega-celebrity with an anesthetic so powerful that it should only be administered in hospitals and then, before calling 911, contacting your girlfriend for a date. But even with all of that (and plenty more), Dr. Murray put his defense in a tight bind by his decision to speak to the police just days after Michael Jackson’s death. Rather than invoking his right to shut up (also known as asserting his 5th Amendment rights), Dr. Murray admitted to police investigators that he repeatedly injected Jackson with the drug Propofol the very day he died.

The immediate effect of those admissions was to give the investigators the information they needed to get a search warrant, even before receiving the autopsy results. And the long term effect of the admissions was to lock Dr. Murray into a story (and timeline) that he could never recover from. Without those statements it would have been far more difficult for the prosecution to prove that it was Dr. Murray who actually gave Jackson the fatal dose. Those statements also made it virtually impossible for Dr. Murray to take the stand in his own defense.