Judge Limits Testimony on Menendezes’ Upbringing : Courts: Extensive description of the brothers’ childhoods is barred as being irrelevant to murder charge.

A judge dealt a legal blow to defense lawyers for Erik and Lyle Menendez on Wednesday, barring extensive testimony on the family’s troubled history because he said the murder trial “is not a child custody case.”

Defense lawyers said the parents’ alleged abuse of the brothers since early childhood would show jurors what drove them to kill their parents. Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg disagreed, saying the events cited were too remote in time and relevance.

He allowed a cousin of the brothers to testify about a difficult summer she spent with the family only after excising large portions of her planned testimony.

Kathleen Simonton, a daughter of Kitty Menendez’s sister, said that in the summer, 1976, she came from Arizona to New Jersey to visit the Menendezes, relatives who were seen as “the perfect family.” Instead she found a tense, grim household.

“If you were told you were going to do something, you did it,” she said. “You would follow the orders.”

Erik Menendez was ridiculed by his mother for stuttering, she said, and Lyle Menendez was berated as being stupid for not excelling in athletics. They were frequently locked in their rooms, she said. Lyle was 8 and Erik was 6 at the time.

Simonton, who was 15, said Jose and Kitty Menendez yelled at her when they caught her smoking and told her repeatedly “how ungrateful I was.”

Asked to describe the times that Kitty Menendez yelled at her for failing to perform chores, Simonton, 32, reddened and appeared to be fighting tears.

“I don’t like to think of the times she yelled at me,” she said. “They upset me. . . . The intensity of her anger, her rage, could be very scary.”

After two months, Simonton said, she fled.

“I asked to leave because I was miserable there,” she said. “I wanted to go home and have a normal summer, whatever was left of it.”

She was the second Menendez cousin to testify about abuses in the household. But in an hourlong hearing with jurors absent, Weisberg said he would not allow jurors to hear much more of such testimony.

Weisberg said he is trying to follow the law in limiting evidence to matters directly related to the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun killings of the Menendez parents.

Erik Menendez, 22, and Lyle Menendez, 25, say they killed their parents in self-defense after years of emotional and physical abuse comparable to that inflicted on battered women. The prosecution says they killed out of greed for the fortune of their father, an entertainment executive.

The judge barred testimony that Jose belittled his sons for being unable to swim well or speak Spanish well, insisting they should do both well since they came from a long line of athletes and their heritage was Cuban.

Defense attorney Jill Lansing argued: “Jose Menendez was probably in some respects crazy and his references to genetic makeup is relevant. It’s damaging to children to be raised by crazy people.”