Menendez Defense Is Belittled : Trial: Prosecutor assails self-defense assertions in his closing argument to the Erik Menendez jury. He illustrates his remarks with six photos of the bloody death scene.

While one jury deliberated the case of Lyle Menendez, a second jury heard a prosecutor denounce his brother Monday as a vicious murderer who tried to put his dead parents on trial.

“The defendant and his brother viciously and mercilessly attacked their parents,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Lester Kuriyama, standing before a board plastered with six pictures of the bloody 1989 Menendez murder scene.

“The defense is no less merciless and malicious to the victims,” Kuriyama said. “They have tried to place the victims on trial.”

He accused Erik Menendez and his brother of telling “outright lies about people who can’t be here to defend themselves.”

And he belittled the defense contention that Erik Menendez killed in self-defense, out of fear.

“Erik feared all right,” Kuriyama said. “He feared he’d have to get off his butt and work like the rest of us.”

Erik Menendez, 23, and Lyle Menendez, 25, are charged with murdering Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion.

Prosecutors said the brothers plotted the killings to avoid being disinherited and to escape their parents’ control. The brothers said they acted out of fear and self-defense, certain that their parents planned to kill them after years of sexual and psychological abuse.

Erik Menendez’s attorney, Leslie Abramson, told jurors the gory death pictures were “a cheap trick” by the prosecution to inflame their sympathies and distract them from asking why the killings happened.

She then posted her own pictures, nude photos of Erik and Lyle Menendez, and punched thumbtacks in them to symbolize what “Jose Menendez did when he was molesting his children.”

When Erik Menendez “could not take the worst of it anymore,” Abramson said, he “went to his frankly equally screwed-up brother for help and”--pointing to the photos of the dead parents in pools of blood--”this is what happened.”

She asked jurors to find Erik Menendez guilty of manslaughter.

Lyle Menendez’s jury received the case on Friday after three days of closing arguments. They were deliberating on another floor of the same courthouse as closing arguments in Erik Menendez’s case got under way. It is expected to go to the jury by Wednesday.

The dual juries were chosen because of separate legal issues in each brother’s case. They sat through much of the testimony together, but occasionally one jury heard witnesses who did not appear before the other.

While admitting that the parents “weren’t perfect,” Kuriyama said that witnesses showed Jose Menendez loved his sons.

“He put pressure on them to be the best,” Kuriyama said. “He had no hobbies. He spent all of his time on his sons.”

He denounced the defendants for seeking to portray their parents as monsters and themselves as helpless children.

“It is clear the defendant and his brother were adults,” Kuriyama said.

Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg has said that if one jury returns verdicts before the other he will seal them and wait for verdicts in the second before announcing them in court.