Jurors Deadlocked in Erik Menendez Trial : Courts: Foreman says he sees ‘no hope’ for a verdict. Judge orders panel to see if a decision can be reached.

The jury weighing murder charges against Erik Menendez announced Monday that it was deadlocked after three weeks of deliberations.

Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ordered the jurors to keep trying for a verdict.

There had been no sign of trouble in the deliberations until Monday morning, when the Erik Menendez jury--in its 16th day--passed a note saying there was absolutely no progress toward a verdict in the case of the younger of the two Beverly Hills brothers charged in the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of their parents.

“We are deadlocked,” said the note written by the foreman, a chemist and dean at Cal State Northridge. “Positions have essentially not changed after three weeks of discussion and debate. I see no hope for reaching agreement on any of the counts.”

The jury did not indicate how it was split on any charge or how many votes it had taken. Before deliberations began, Weisberg gave jurors four possible verdicts to consider in the slaying of each Menendez parent, ranging from first-degree murder--which could carry the death penalty--to involuntary manslaughter.

The possible deadlock in the Erik Menendez panel was revealed while a separate jury considering the charges against Lyle Menendez deliberated for its 18th day. Those jurors listened Monday as a court stenographer read back hundreds of pages of testimony, covering the brothers’ accounts of the day they killed their parents.

In asking the Erik Menendez panel to return behind closed doors Monday afternoon, Weisberg said he wanted to find out if more deliberations could lead to the “reasonable probability” of a verdict.

As jurors filed back into the jury room, Erik Menendez, 23, showed no emotion. Just moments before, when he walked into the courtroom, he wore a big smile--apparently alerted by his lawyers to the content of the jury note.

Outside court after the hearing, one of those lawyers, Leslie Abramson, sharply criticized the judge for prodding the jury to try to resolve its deadlock without first giving her an opportunity to review his instructions.

“This is outrageous,” Abramson told reporters. “He knows those kinds of instructions are very controversial. This is the most highhanded, obnoxious judge I’ve ever tried a case before.”

In a case in which Weisberg ruled that jurors should not be given the option of an outright acquittal, a hung jury could be seen as a major victory for the defense.

Prosecutors said that if there is a hung jury, they will definitely retry the case and push for a full murder conviction.

“It’s not over,” said Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who arrived at the Van Nuys courthouse shortly after the hearing to meet with his two prosecutors on the case, Deputy Dist. Attys. Pamela Bozanich and Lester Kuriyama.

“I’d rather have a hung jury than a manslaughter verdict because this is a murder case,” Garcetti said, adding later: “If it’s a hung jury, regardless of how it’s hung, it will be retried as a murder case--because that’s what it is.”

Erik and Lyle Menendez, who turned 26 Monday, are charged in the slayings of their wealthy parents, Jose Menendez, 45, and Kitty Menendez, 47.

Two juries are hearing the case because some evidence was admitted against only one brother.

Prosecutors contend that the brothers killed out of hatred and greed. But Lyle and Erik Menendez testified that they killed in fear after years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

The provocative defense--suggesting that the brothers were the real victims in the Menendez household--has polarized debate outside the courtroom during the five-month trial. It drew the fervent support of some spectators touched by the brothers’ tearful tales of being molested. But skeptics were outraged, viewing the brothers as coldblooded killers now fabricating a defense.

The note from the foreman Monday suggested that the same dynamic may have been at work in the jury room.

After gathering the jurors in court at 3:42 p.m., Weisberg urged the panel not to give up, saying: “The question I would ask you is whether there is a reasonable probability the jury might arrive at a verdict.”

The judge did not set a deadline for the jury to report back to him. The jurors met in private for 40 minutes after Weisberg’s appeal, then went home for the night. They are not being sequestered.

It is not unusual for jurors to tell a judge they are having trouble reaching a verdict, or for the judge to ask them to keep at it. If the panel continues to report a deadlock, Weisberg would have to order a mistrial.

In court, Abramson asked the judge to find out at least if the jury had ruled out some of the “greater” charges, starting with first-degree murder. If the jury reached consensus on that much, Erik Menendez would not face the death penalty at a retrial.

Although legal experts had anticipated lively debate in the jury room, jurors have never shown any signs of tension during their periodic appearances in court and their breaks from deliberation when they often walk around the courthouse. In fact, they have seemed steadfastly cheerful.

The two juries deliberate on separate floors and have been instructed not to mingle with each other.

The Lyle Menendez jury reported its interest in reviewing a mass of testimony--more than 400 pages--in a note sent to the judge Friday, Weisberg disclosed in court Monday.

That note, the judge said, asked for every word of the brothers’ testimony about the events of Aug. 20, 1989, from “the time they woke up to the time of the 911 call,” in which Lyle Menendez called police near midnight to say they had discovered the bodies of their parents.

The judge said the jury was entitled to hear whatever it wanted. But re-reads take about one page per minute, the judge said, meaning that it would take nearly seven hours to read those pages--so jurors were scheduled to still be listening to the material today.

The material read back Monday included Lyle Menendez’s testimony that he had a sense of dread on the afternoon of the 20th, when he said hello to his parents--who were watching tennis on TV--and got no response.

“I was feeling like a ghost, like we were already dead,” Lyle Menendez testified.

Jurors also heard again how Lyle Menendez “freaked out” that night, after the parents closed the door to the TV room.

Sure that the closing of the door was a sign of imminent death, Lyle Menendez testified, he and his brother raced outside to their car, loaded their 12-gauge shotguns, dashed back into the house and into the TV room. “We just burst in the doors and started firing,” he said.

Much of the testimony included lengthy cross-examination about what happened after the shootings, such as how the brothers constructed an alibi and disposed of guns, shotgun shells and bloody clothes.

In the note sent Friday to Weisberg, jurors also asked for one other snippet of testimony from Lyle Menendez--about how the brothers, worrying about fingerprints, scooped up expended shotgun shells after the shootings.

“Please have the (stenographer) read this section slowly,” the jurors ordered. It was read back, slowly, before the stenographer launched into the 400-plus other pages.

The Lyle Menendez jury’s appearance in court, its first in a week, also revealed that one alternate juror was missing, apparently dismissed after secret hearings last week. Only one alternate remains of the six who began the trial in July.

Weisberg ordered lawyers not to discuss the alternate’s absence with reporters.