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LoginWith Conrad Murray now expected to be indicted in the death of Michael Jackson, meet the tattooed former prosecutor from Houston who will seek to keep the doctor out of jail. Plus, Gerald Posner on the L.A. District Attorney’s office battles that helped delay the charges expected against Murray.
Editor's Note: In an earlier version of this article, one sentence was copied from a Texas Lawyer report without attribution. The Daily Beast has attributed the sentence and regrets the error.
Now that Dr. Conrad Murray is expected to be indicted for involuntary manslaughter, it seems likely there will be another Los Angeles-based “trial of the century.” Celebrity defendants in previous media-saturated trials were sometimes represented by celebrity attorneys: F. Lee Bailey, Barry Scheck, Johnnie Cochran. But Murray’s defense lawyer, Ed Chernoff, probably wasn’t even on the Rolodex of any Court TV producer.
Murray and Chernoff had never met before Jackson’s death. The morning after the pop star died last June, and police began questioning Murray at the UCLA Medical Center, Murray called an attorney he knew in Houston. (Murray has medical clinics there and in Las Vegas.) That lawyer called another, who in turn recommended Chernoff.
“He’s so damn smart, and the juries like him and find him trustworthy.”
“When I first heard it, I thought it was a con,” recalls Chernoff, a bodybuilder and former star prosecutor whose three-person Houston firm has carved out a business in DWI’s, sex crimes, domestic disputes and murder. After several phone calls, Chernoff was willing “to make the leap of faith and fly to Los Angeles, but I said that someone has to get money in our account so I don’t go out naked to L.A. on some boondoggle.”
Murray paid for Chernoff’s $1,200 last-minute flight by credit card. “I didn’t even have time for a Google search before heading to the airport,” recalls Chernoff. Sitting in the rear of a packed plane, he did a lot of “you’re kidding me” to two strangers who turned out to be Jackson-obsessed; he got enough details during the four-hour flight to realize how serious the situation was for his new client.
Chernoff and Murray met the next morning at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, a spot they picked to avoid the paparazzi. They created a makeshift office in a private room near the hotel’s restaurant. When the police came to interview Murray that night at the hotel, he laid out a timeline of what happened the night Jackson died, and what medications he had administered to the singer. While Chernoff won’t discuss the details of that meeting, he told The Daily Beast "that what Murray told the police hasn’t changed and what he told them he did isn’t a crime.”