Menendez Trial Goes Into Its Final Phase : Courts: Prosecution, defense begin closing arguments. Judge alters jurors’ options to include involuntary manslaughter.

With the prosecution pressing for first-degree murder and the defense urging manslaughter, closing arguments in the Menendez brothers’ murder trial began Wednesday, featuring vastly different versions of the shotgun slayings of their parents.

Suggesting that Lyle and Erik Menendez were actors on a par with Robert DeNiro and liars on the scale of Adolf Hitler, a prosecutor said the brothers executed a “premeditated, cold-blooded, calculated” crime Aug. 20, 1989--and deserve to be convicted of first-degree murder.

Tacking up a photo of a bloody Jose Menendez on a couch and a gory Kitty Menendez on the floor of the family room in their Beverly Hills mansion, Deputy Dist. Atty. Pamela Bozanich told jurors: “This is not a hard case. This is not a complicated case. These two people were watching TV and they got slaughtered by their sons.”

The defense countered that the brothers shot their parents to death in a state of panic, and they deserve mercy.

Defense lawyer Michael Burt asked jurors to consider whether the slayings were “a response--a response of fear and panic that followed year after year after year of abuse by bullying parents.”

“The answer to that question is--or may be--a life and death one for Lyle Menendez,” Burt said.

Two juries are hearing the case, one for each brother. Arguments on Wednesday were to the Lyle Menendez jury only, and are due to resume today. Arguments on the case against Erik Menendez are set for next week.

With the focus on him first, Lyle Menendez showed little emotion. Now and then, as the prosecutor spoke, he turned to his lawyer and whispered, “Not true.”

Lyle Menendez, 25, and Erik Menendez, 23, have been on trial for five months. They are charged with first-degree murder, and prosecutors are alleging two special circumstances that carry the death penalty: that the killings were multiple murders and that the brothers killed while lying in wait.

The brothers testified that they acted in self-defense after years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Prosecutors contend that the motives were hatred and greed.

In a setback for the defense, Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ruled last week that the facts of the case did not warrant even giving the jurors the option of an acquittal--meaning that the panels would have to ignore the legal instructions to deliver not guilty verdicts.

But the judge gave the defense some consolation Wednesday by saying he would give jurors four options: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and--in a change from previous positions--involuntary manslaughter.

Involuntary manslaughter--meaning a killing without premeditation and intent--carries a prison term of two to four years.

The defense attorney immediately zeroed in on that lesser charge, contending that the evidence showed Lyle Menendez did not plan to kill his parents. Time and again, Burt came back to the notion that Lyle Menendez fired at his parents as if he were on autopilot.

The lawyer quoted the older brother’s testimony about the shootings--”I wasn’t thinking”--and said that testimony led defense experts to find that the shootings were a “physiological response to fear, an instinctual response.”

For a murder conviction, Burt said, the law demands more.

In large measure, Burt stuck to a discussion of the law Wednesday, saving for today the retelling of the defense’s most emotional argument--the abuse the brothers say they endured. Lyle Menendez said he was abused for two years and Erik Menendez testified that he was molested for 12 years.

As he closed, Burt reminded jurors that their verdict could lead to a “second trial,” a penalty phase where they would decide between life in prison and the death penalty--making it plain, without ever saying so, that the lengthy trial would drag on through the holidays and into 1994.

Burt emphasized the law, but Bozanich hammered at the testimony.

Lyle and Erik Menendez carefully plotted the killings, even driving to San Diego and using false ID to buy guns two days beforehand, she asserted.

The trial, Bozanich said, was not about whether the parents were bad parents. “We don’t execute people for being bad parents,” she said.

Nor, she said, was it about whether L. Jerome Oziel, the Beverly Hills therapist who testified that the brothers confessed to him, had an extramarital affair--the details of which took up weeks of the case.

Those issues, Bozanich said, were put forward by the defense to hide the grim details of the killings. “There have been Presidents of the United States who had girlfriends and they were not crucified as devoutly as Dr. Oziel,” she said.

She said Oziel’s testimony was bolstered by the one piece of evidence that emerged from his therapy sessions with the brothers--a recording of a Dec. 11, 1989, session in which Lyle Menendez told the psychologist “there was no way” he was going to kill his mother without his brother’s consent. “I just let him sleep on it for a couple days,” Lyle Menendez told Oziel.

“Implicit in that is that the decision to kill was coldly and carefully arrived at,” Bozanich said.

The motive, she said, was simple but subtle: The brothers were desperate to maintain their Beverly Hills lifestyle but had grown weary of being accountable to their wealthy, domineering father. And, she said, they feared that their parents would disinherit them.

She belittled Lyle Menendez, saying he callously spent thousands of dollars after the killings--$15,039 on Rolex watches and money clips, $70,484 on a Porsche and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a chicken-wing restaurant.

“Shopping to be able to get over (killing) your parents seems to be taking shopping a bit far,” Bozanich said.

Bozanich also said the brothers “lied at every chance they got,” citing the “bombshell” of Erik Menendez’s testimony that they went to the Big 5 sporting goods store in Santa Monica to buy handguns in 1989, only to be confronted with the fact that it had not sold handguns in three years.

“That is a big lie,” she said, citing Hitler’s observation in his book “Mein Kampf” that a big lie is easier to swallow than a small one.

Because the brothers’ “credibility is almost nil,” their story--that the parents were about to kill them the night of Aug. 20--is highly suspect, Bozanich said.

One prosecution witness, Karen Farrell, said that Kitty Menendez invited her over that night for bridge.

“What was it, ‘Come over, play bridge and watch us kill our sons?’ ” Bozanich asked jurors.

She said the brothers knew that a defense based on abuse would generate confusion.

Like DeNiro, they studied and studied their “script,” and after more than three years behind bars thought they had it down pat, Bozanich said.

The prosecutor said the allegations of sexual abuse are fabricated.

“This case is not about sexual abuse,” Bozanich told jurors. “The sexual abuse is here to make the parents look so bad that you don’t care that they’re dead.”