Defense Urges Leniency for Lyle Menendez : Courts: Attorney asks jurors to consider his ‘pain’ and not judge him harshly because of his earlier lies and free-spending ways.

Crying as she urged leniency for Lyle Menendez, a defense lawyer told jurors Thursday that he and his brother killed their parents when they stormed into the TV room of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion in a “blind panic and started firing.”

“We are not here to say they acted reasonably,” attorney Jill Lansing said of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who shotgunned their parents to death four years ago.

But that is “not the test,” Lansing said in a daylong final argument in the brothers’ murder trial. The question, she said, is: “What in the world could have caused these two boys to kill their parents?”

Her answer: fear fed by years of abuse.

Asking jurors to find Lyle Menendez, 25, guilty of manslaughter, not murder, Lansing said he was telling the truth about being molested. But prosecutors have repeatedly dismissed the brothers’ tearful testimony as fiction.

In closing, Lansing pleaded with jurors for two favors. She asked them not to judge the claims of abuse harshly because of a “gender bias.” She said, “If Erik was Lyle’s little sister, would you look at this case differently?”

She also implored jurors not to hold Lyle Menendez’s free-spending lifestyle against him. “Because you are rich doesn’t mean you can’t be afraid,” she said.

Lansing burst into tears as she concluded, saying to jurors, “I ask you now not to turn away from the pain.” Lyle Menendez sobbed also.

The brothers are charged with first-degree murder. Two juries are hearing the case, one for each, and Lyle Menendez’s case is expected to go to his jury today after prosecutors wind up a rebuttal argument.

That panel will begin deliberations even while closing arguments are made to the jury for Erik Menendez, 23, next week. But the verdicts will be announced together, Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg has said.

On Thursday, the judge removed from the Lyle Menendez panel a juror who has repeatedly asked for medical leaves.

The brothers, who could face the death penalty if convicted of first-degree murder, have admitted the Aug. 20, 1989, slayings of their parents, Jose Menendez, 45, an entertainment executive, and Kitty Menendez, 47.

Prosecutors contend that the brothers killed out of hatred and greed. But Lansing belittled that notion.

Although Lyle Menendez bought a Rolex watch, a car and a restaurant after the killings, that did not signify a lifestyle upgrade, she said.

“He spent all the money he had access to before (his parents) died and all the money he had access to after they died,” she said.

And, she asked jurors, “would money really have been a trade-off for you to live the life Lyle Menendez lived?”

Recounting his life, she spent hours reviewing the testimony of teachers, coaches, friends and neighbors who depicted Jose Menendez as a cold bully and Kitty Menendez as a rage-filled enigma.

That testimony took weeks, with witnesses also sniping at the parents, one saying Kitty Menendez needed “a bleach job.”

But Lansing said it was all important, “in explaining . . . how these children could have feared their parents, to tell you who these parents were.”

From age 6 to 8, Lyle Menendez testified, his father molested him.

Showing jurors childhood photos of the brothers naked, showing only their lower bodies, Lansing repeated Lyle Menendez’s testimony that “he cried and he bled and”--as her voice caught--”he asked his father not to.”

Then showing pictures of Kitty Menendez--in a strapless pink formal gown, in lingerie and in a bathing suit--Lansing said she also sexually abused Lyle Menendez.

“She let him touch her,” Lansing said.

That abuse ended when he was 14, but from then on Kitty Menendez was “degrading and cruel” to him, the defense attorney said.

Lansing also advanced a new theory Thursday, one she said bolstered the brothers’ assertion that the abuse was real--although she conceded that she did not have a “shred of proof” to back it up.

She began by recalling testimony that after the Menendez family moved from New Jersey to California in 1986, Jose Menendez, who had always been hostile and indifferent to his wife, suddenly began treating her with love and care.

It must have been, Lansing told jurors, that Kitty Menendez “got strong enough to talk about divorce, to talk about custody, got strong enough to talk about what she was willing to tell to get a favorable divorce settlement.”

“Kitty Menendez had a very powerful secret. And Jose Menendez did not want that secret told.”

According to the brothers’ testimony, they killed their parents after a series of confrontations that began Aug. 15, 1989, when Erik Menendez disclosed to his older brother that their father had been molesting him for 12 years.

In the defense account, Lyle Menendez warned his father two days later to stop the abuse or the sons would tell outsiders about it.

On Aug. 20, convinced that their parents were about to kill them rather than suffer a sex scandal, the brothers killed first--sure that when the parents closed the door to the TV room, their deaths were at hand, Lansing said.

She conceded, however, that they did not act the way a reasonable person might have. “They read the cues and they read them wrong,” Lansing said.

But she insisted that the shootings happened just the way Lyle Menendez told it from the stand, even though he admitted that he lied repeatedly to police, relatives and the press.

“Lyle Menendez lied to a lot of people about a lot of things before he got to this courtroom,” Lansing said. “But he didn’t lie to you.”

As proof, she cited Lyle Menendez’s testimony that he reloaded and fired at his mother as she was “sneaking” away.

He also confirmed that he offered his onetime girlfriend, Jamie Pisarcik, a bribe to falsely testify that Jose Menendez had made a pass at her, Lansing said.

The defense attorney cited her client’s admitted lies in a bid to defuse the courtroom episode that prosecutors called the “bombshell” of the trial.

That was the brothers’ testimony that they had gone to the Big 5 sporting goods store in Santa Monica to pick out handguns in August, 1989. But they were confronted in court with the fact that the chain stopped selling handguns in 1986.

Lansing asked “how significant” that was “in light of all the things they could have lied about.”

She also tried to soften the impact of the Dec. 11, 1989, tape of the brothers’ counseling session with psychologist L. Jerome Oziel. In it, Lyle Menendez said they killed their mother to put her “out of her misery” and that their father’s infidelities were the cause of her despair.

That theory was Oziel’s, Lansing said, and the brothers merely told him what he wanted to hear.

The tape had drawn gasps in court when Lyle Menendez said he missed his parents, then added, “I miss not having my dog around. If I can make such a gross analogy.”

“That is a gross analogy,” Lansing acknowledged Thursday. But she noted that the family dog bit Lyle Menendez at the age of 3, and suggested one last time that the home was filled with violence. “He grew up with a dog he loved,” she said, “who was vicious.”