Menendez Case Goes to 2nd Jury : Trial: Prosecutors say discord over Erik Menendez’s sexual orientation led to the killings.

With a prosecutor urging jurors to “bring the murderers of Jose and Kitty Menendez to justice” and a defense lawyer relating her “fantasy” of seeing Erik Menendez go free, the second of the Menendez brothers’ murder cases went to jurors Wednesday.

Capping the five-month trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lester Kuriyama suggested that Erik Menendez was gay, and that his sexual orientation--not abuse by his parents--fed a family friction that led to the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez.

In a rebuttal that lasted 80 minutes, a vivid contrast to defense lawyer Leslie Abramson’s three-day plea for leniency, Kuriyama also dismissed her assertions that Erik Menendez is less culpable than his older brother because Lyle Menendez fired close-range shots at both parents.

Both brothers, Kuriyama said, burst into the TV room of the family’s Beverly Hills home with their shotguns blazing. Erik Menendez, he said, did not have the right to anoint himself “accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner.” He urged the jury to convict Erik Menendez of first-degree murder.

Abramson, who wrapped up her argument earlier Wednesday, said that Erik Menendez is guilty, at most, of manslaughter. She portrayed him as the real victim in the case, enduring a lifetime of “parental warfare” that drove him “over the edge.”

Although Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ruled that the facts of the case did not warrant giving jurors the option of outright acquittal, Abramson urged such a verdict.

“I want to see him walk down the street, not in chains, not in shackles, not with a deputy sheriff standing next to him,” she said.

Erik Menendez, 23, and Lyle Menendez, 25, have been in County Jail since their arrests in 1990, charged with first-degree murder in the killings of their parents, Jose Menendez, 45, a wealthy entertainment executive, and Kitty Menendez, 47.

Two juries heard the case because some evidence was admissible against only one of the brothers. The Lyle Menendez jury deliberated for a fourth day Wednesday on a different floor of the Van Nuys courthouse.

Weisberg has said he will wait for both juries to reach verdicts before announcing them.

If convicted of first-degree murder, the brothers could be sentenced to death. A conviction of involuntary manslaughter, the least severe offense among the four options given jurors, means a prison term of only two to four years.

Erik Menendez’s other lawyer, Marcia Morrissey, said after court that “he’s very, very anxious. He’s very concerned. His life is on the line. Nobody realizes that better than Erik.”

Earlier, Abramson told jurors, “If you were to convict Erik Menendez of murder, you wouldn’t be teaching him a lesson in individual responsibility. You’d be ending his life.”

Reflecting the obvious in a trial in which virtually every piece of evidence was contested, Abramson noted that the case was “very polarized.” But she urged jurors to reach a decisive verdict.

“Either you accept what we have proven or you do not. But you do not compromise,” she said.

The brothers testified that they lashed out in fear and self-defense after years of physical, mental and sexual abuse.

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Although Abramson repeatedly insisted that the defense was not blaming the parents for their own slayings, she called Jose Menendez a “power junkie,” said Kitty Menendez was “angry at life” and described both as having “declared war” against their sons.

“They are not in an absolute sense the worst people in the world,” she said. “They’re just people who never, ever should have had children.”

The tragedy, Abramson said, is that the slayings could have been avoided if the Menendez parents had only said “a word or two” to their sons. “How about, ‘I’m sorry.’ How about, ‘We’ll work it out,’ ” the defense attorney said.

Kuriyama, who presented an initial two-hour summation to jurors Monday, began his final rebuttal Wednesday by comparing the defense strategy to the opening scene of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”: against a backdrop of thunder and lightning, a witch says, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

“Things got turned around in this case,” Kuriyama said.

The defense, he said, put on months of evidence to distract jurors. “I’d like to get back to the murder case,” he said.

Prosecutors, he said, proved that Erik and Lyle Menendez were tired of being controlled by their dominating father. After thinking about it, he said, they opted to kill their mother too.

In a nutshell, he said, that is what the brothers told their Beverly Hills therapist, L. Jerome Oziel, in a taped 1989 session.

Kuriyama did not spell out how Erik Menendez’s sexual orientation provided a motive for the killing. But he said he felt obliged to bring it up because the defense made so much of the father-son relationship.

Under questioning by Abramson during the trial, the younger Menendez brother said he sometimes wondered whether he was gay--but blamed his uncertainty on the abuse forced on him by his father. He added that he had girlfriends.

Kuriyama, however, reminded jurors of Erik Menendez’s testimony that he discussed with “his young buddies how to make semen taste better,” and that he flavored his father’s coffee with cinnamon to make oral sex more palatable.

The prosecutor also cited Erik Menendez’s testimony that his mother taped his phone calls and gave him a six-month deadline to get a girlfriend.

Kuriyama suggested that far from forcing homosexual sex on his son, Jose Menendez was disdainful of his son’s sexual orientation, calling Erik Menendez a “faggot.” If, indeed, Erik Menendez was gay, that “would account for his being able to describe what he described for you,” Kuriyama said, meaning various sex acts.

After court, Abramson lambasted the argument as “despicable.”