Jackson doctor to surrender Friday regardless

Michael Jackson's doctor plans to surrender to authorities Friday, regardless of whether prosecutors had filed a case against him, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

The assertion came after the legal team for Dr. Conrad Murray said they were tired of waiting for word from prosecutors about when he would be charged. Murray, who has a practice in Houston, has been in Los Angeles for the past week and available to surrender since Tuesday.

"We are going to be at the courthouse at 1:30 (p.m.) for his surrender," said Miranda Sevcik, spokeswoman for Murray's legal team. "We see no reason to perpetuate the arbitrary situation any longer."

The district attorney's office has not confirmed if or when it will be charging Murray, though prosecutors have been reviewing the case for weeks. Murray's team sees a charge as inevitable, Sevcik said.

"We know he's going to be charged with involuntary manslaughter and we are ready with a counterargument," Sevcik said. "He's not guilty — that's our argument."

It remains to be seen whether the bizarre prospect of Murray trying to surrender without a criminal case being filed will come to pass.

The move follows three days of negotiations in which Murray's lawyers have tried to arrange with prosecutors for the Houston doctor to surrender for booking and arraignment.

Those plans were derailed by haggling between prosecutors and law enforcement officials over whether the physician should be arrested or allowed to turn himself in.

Officials from the Los Angeles Police Department, which spent the past seven months investigating Murray, were unhappy with the idea of him surrendering and wanted to go to the residence he was staying at to arrest him, a law enforcement official close to the investigation told The Associated Press.

Various factors weighed into the desire to arrest Murray, including the possibility he might flee before arraignment, just as O.J. Simpson did, said the official, who was