Lawyers in Menendez Case Spar : Trial: Prosecutor displays pictures of the naked brothers and bloody death scene. Defense attorney for Erik calls it a ‘cheap . . . trick.’

With pictures of naked boys and their dead parents plastered on a bulletin board, a prosecutor Monday denounced Erik Menendez as a vicious murderer and a defense lawyer countered that he was “driven over the edge” by “disgusting, perverted” sexual abuse.

As one jury deliberated the fate of Lyle Menendez, closing arguments in the case of Erik Menendez began with both prosecution and defense making much of photos taken of a bloodied Jose and Kitty Menendez, shot to death Aug. 20, 1989, by their sons.

“The defendant and his brother viciously and mercilessly attacked their parents,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Lester Kuriyama said, tacking up half a dozen gory pictures. “The defense is no less merciless and malicious to the victims. They have tried to place the victims on trial.”

Urging jurors to convict Erik Menendez of first-degree murder, Kuriyama said the younger Menendez brother killed to be free of his father’s control and ridiculed the defense claim that the brothers lashed out in fear after years of sexual abuse.

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

Later, defense lawyer Leslie Abramson called the gory photos a “cheap prosecution trick” designed to make jurors “forget to ask the important question: Why did this happen?”

Putting up photos of Lyle and Erik Menendez as young boys--naked and faceless, with only their lower bodies shown--Abramson stuck pins into the photo of the younger brother, recalling his testimony that his father stuck pins and tacks into him during sex.

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 this,” Abramson continued, pointing to the photos of the dead parents in pools of blood--”is what happened.”

She asked jurors to find Erik Menendez guilty of manslaughter.

Erik Menendez showed little emotion Monday in court, so little that at one point Abramson interrupted her argument and, looking at him from across the courtroom, instructed: “Smile.”

Both Erik Menendez, 23, and Lyle Menendez, 25, are charged with first-degree murder. If convicted, they could be sentenced to death.

A conviction for involuntary manslaughter, however, would mean only two to four years in state prison. Both brothers have already been in custody for more than three years.

Two juries are hearing the case because some of the testimony in the five-month trial was admissible against one brother only. The Lyle Menendez jury received its case Friday.

Though it is likely one jury will return with a verdict before the other, Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg has said he will seal the first verdict and announce both together.

In large measure, the arguments Monday mirrored the statements presented last week before the Lyle Menendez jury.

What gave spice to the proceedings Monday was the difference in style between the two lawyers.

Abramson, as usual, was loud, humorous and sarcastic. Just as she had promised she would, she took time from recounting the mountains of detail that made up the case to sketch in broad strokes.

Near the beginning of the afternoon session, for instance, she spoke of a “certain kind of prejudice, a certain kind of discrimination,” something that “Americans like to do. It’s called hate the rich.”

The fact that Jose and Kitty Menendez were wealthy, she asserted, actually made the sons’ lives worse because the money gave the parents control over them.

And though the defense spotlighted the issue of child abuse throughout the trial, she declared, “The abused children of this country do not want pity for what they’ve gone through. Erik doesn’t want pity for what he’s gone through. . . . What he wants is understanding.”

Kuriyama, in contrast, reached for no big themes. He was straightforward and quiet--so quiet that he was hard to hear when arguing that the killings were planned and that the brothers were “arrogant men who demonstrated disdain for their parents.”

He reminded jurors that Erik Menendez was not a newcomer to criminal behavior, having been implicated in two burglaries in Calabasas--in which about $100,000 worth of property was stolen--the summer before the slayings.

Over the next year, the brothers became convinced that their father was going to write them out of his will, Kuriyama said.

At the end of July, 1989, he noted, NBC television aired a movie on the Billionaire Boys Club, a group of young Southern California men who turned to murder--one of them the brother of a friend of Erik Menendez. That movie, Kuriyama suggested, gave Erik and Lyle Menendez the idea of killing their parents.

They had plenty of incentive to kill their domineering father, Kuriyama said, because Jose Menendez “put pressure on the defendant” and Erik Menendez “didn’t want to toe the line.”

He quoted from a taped counseling session with Beverly Hills psychologist L. Jerome Oziel in which Erik Menendez said that Kitty Menendez “had to be killed” because it was “the only way out.”

The prosecutor called “completely ludicrous” the brothers explanation that an aimless freeway drive led them to San Diego on Aug. 18, 1989, where they bought shotguns using a false ID--from one of Lyle Menendez’s friends--and paying cash.

Two days later, with the family maid gone for the weekend, the brothers bolted into the TV room and Kitty Menendez wound up “getting blasted all over that room,” suffering 10 wounds, the prosecutor said.

“The decision then was made to kill both parents,” Kuriyama argued. “That is a choice the defendants made. They should be held responsible for making that decision.”

Abramson observed that much of Kuriyama’s argument involved both brothers. She asked jurors not to lump Erik Menendez in with his older brother.

“All of Erik’s life, he was overshadowed by Lyle,” Abramson said. Lyle Menendez was also involved in the second of the 1988 Calabasas thefts, she noted, but Erik “took the big rap.”

“Lyle,” Abramson said, “would not go to the gas chamber for him.”

Erik Menendez killed, she said, after enduring “constant, chronic, high-level and low-level cruelty” and “extensive, severe” sexual abuse.

She said, “This was not Ozzie and Harriet versus the bad seeds.”

Prosecutors claim the allegations of abuse are fiction. Abramson said Monday of Kuriyama, “He says it’s made up. I say, ‘Prove it.’ ”

The picture of the naked brothers, she asserted, was “hard evidence of molestation.”

She said it was telling on cross-examination that Kuriyama asked no questions of Erik Menendez about the alleged abuse. The prosecutor “ran from the evidence,” she said. “Why? Because he was afraid he would not be able to show it wasn’t true.”

Abramson also lit after Oziel, who testified for the prosecution that the brothers confessed to him. She called him “manipulative, two-faced (and) lying,” and argued that jurors should disregard his testimony that the brothers planned to kill.

There never was any such plan, Abramson argued. If there had been, among other things, the brothers never would have used an ID in San Diego that could be traced back to them, she said.

Abramson will continue her closing argument when court resumes today. Then Kuriyama will be allowed a rebuttal argument before Weisberg gives Erik Menendez’s case to jurors.