Menendezes Can Use Abuse Defense, Judge Says : Courts: Prosecutors had sought to preclude evidence that dominated the brothers’ first murder trial. The jurist says he will sharply limit testimony on minutiae of the defendants’ lives, however.

Rejecting a prosecution bid to deny Lyle and Erik Menendez the core of their provocative defense, a judge ruled Tuesday that evidence of abuse the brothers allegedly suffered at the hands of their parents is admissible at their retrial.

With virtually no precedent to guide him, Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ruled that the defense--which extends battered women’s unique legal remedies to abused children--was admissible under California law.

Evidence about the horrors of abuse dominated the brothers’ lengthy first trial after prosecutors did not object. But with the retrial due to begin Aug. 23, prosecutors objected vigorously to the same defense.

Weisberg did caution Tuesday that he intends to put limits on the defense, in part by restricting testimony about the brothers’ childhood and scaling back expert testimony.

But he announced no firm limits Tuesday. And defense attorneys were, as lawyer Leslie Abramson put it, “greatly relieved” at the rulings, which wrapped up a lengthy hearing about the scope of the retrial.

“Pretty much, we’re back where we started,” she said with a smile outside court.

She also said: “The defense [the brothers] used at the first trial is absolutely authentic and appropriate and legal and real.”

Outside court, Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn admitted that he was “extremely disappointed, profoundly disappointed, that a ‘battered-person syndrome’ is now admissible in California.” Such a defense has been used so infrequently that there apparently have been no appellate decisions about it.

Weisberg said his decision was relatively close. But he made it plain that because the brothers could draw the death penalty, he wanted to err on the side of caution, saying they were “entitled to have a jury determine their mental state at the time of the crime.”

The judge added, however, that he did not intend to listen to the same parade of teachers, coaches, relatives and friends whose testimony took weeks in the first trial. Calling much of that testimony irrelevant, he said, “This retrial will not include the minutiae introduced by the defense at the first trial.”

At the first trial, Lyle Menendez, now 27, and Erik Menendez, 24, admitted the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez.

The brothers testified that they lashed out in fear after years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Prosecutors countered that the brothers killed out of hatred and greed.

The first trial, which lasted six months, ended in January, 1994, when separate juries--one for each brother--deadlocked between murder and manslaughter charges. The retrial will be held before a single jury.

In the hearings that concluded Tuesday, the defense had ranged far afield in a bid to prove that “battered-person syndrome” exists. The defense even drew from studies of how people reacted to trauma during the Industrial Revolution, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War.

The hearing, which lasted more than a week, often took on the air of a psychology primer, with defense experts discoursing on topics such as “interrelated symptom clusters” and defining such psychological terms of art as “sequela.” (It means “consequences.”).

Four defense witnesses took the stand, asserting that there was such a thing as “battered-person syndrome” and that it was the “functional equivalent” of “battered-woman syndrome.” Only the name, the defense experts said, was different.

“This is a horse of the same color, broken in at the same ranch, if you will,” Abramson, who represents Erik Menendez, argued at one point.

Under cross-examination by Conn, however, the defense experts conceded that there was no such thing as a formal diagnosis of “battered-person syndrome.” Nor, the experts said, was there a precise definition of it in the scientific literature.

The sole prosecution witness, University of Michigan psychology professor Melvin Guyer, filed a statement calling “battered-person syndrome” a “catchall for impressionistic clinical judgments.” Guyer added from the stand: “Being sexually abused is not a diagnosis. It is an event.”

At the first trial, the defense case began with anecdotes from teachers, coaches and others close to the brothers, all of whom testified about the grim nature of life in the Menendez household--in all, about three dozen witnesses.

Mental health experts testified that a lifetime of fear had left the brothers prone to impulse. The sons were 18 and 21 when they killed their parents.

Prosecutors at the first trial, led by Deputy Dist. Atty. Pamela Bozanich, decided not to raise a wholesale objection to the mental health experts.

That tactic was based on a 1991 state law that authorized expert testimony in cases involving a claim of “battered-woman syndrome.” Bozanich reasoned that it would be fruitless to object in a case in which sons were claiming parental abuse.

After the first trial, Conn took over for Bozanich. He took a different tack, objecting vigorously to the mental health experts and arguing that the 1991 law explicitly applies to expert testimony on battered women only--not abused children.

If the Legislature had wanted to include children, Conn said, it could have. Since it did not, he argued, there was no legal basis for the defense to put on its expert witnesses--or the teachers, coaches and others.

In April, Weisberg said he was not convinced that there were legal grounds to permit such testimony and ordered the hearing that climaxed Tuesday.