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Murray showed no emotion as the clerk read the verdict, reached after 10 hours of deliberation.

“Yes!” said Jackson’s sister La Toya Jackson in the audience section of the courtroom. Other Jackson family members and fans shouted in joy.

At his sentencing on Nov. 29, Murray faces a penalty ranging from probation to four years in prison.

Throughout the six-week trial, prosecutors portrayed Murray, 58, as a reckless doctor who for $150,000 a month sold out the Hippocratic oath, and to treat Jackson’s insomnia, gave the King of Pop a nightly drip of propofol, an unpredictable and potentially fatal anesthetic.

“It’s bizarre behavior from anyone, let alone a doctor, this extreme criminal negligence,” Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney David Walgren told jurors in his closing argument Nov. 3.

During the case, prosecutors attempted to show that Murray set the stage for tragedy by also failing to use proper monitoring equipment and devices to help Jackson breathe under heavy anesthesia. The doctor, they said, also repeatedly left Jackson’s bedside to check e-mails and make phone calls, which Walgren characterized as “abandonment.”

Defense attorneys showed that, before Jackson hired Murray as his personal doctor for his “This Is It” tour, he’d concluded that propofol was the only treatment for his insomnia. The attorneys and their medical expert, Dr. Paul White, suggested that Jackson injected extra propofol, and swallowed several tablets of the sedative lorazepam, during moments that morning when Murray’s back was turned – causing Jackson to die so suddenly that Murray could not have saved him.

They also suggested that Murray was in the difficult position of safeguarding the health of a past-his-prime pop star who got routine demerol injections from his dermatologist and who was under extreme pressure to perform 50 sold-out concerts in London. When Jackson paid the ultimate price for his peculiar pharmaceutical predilections, Murray became the fall guy, they said.

“He was just a little fish in a big, dirty pond,” defense attorney Ed Chernoff told the jury.

Conceding that Murray didn’t do everything by the book in his treatment of Jackson, Chernoff said Murray nonetheless should be acquitted because the prosecution failed to prove that these shortcomings caused Jackson’s death.