Menendez ‘Crazy Story’ of Abuse, Fear Is Attacked

Continuing his aggressive attack on the Menendez brothers’ defense, a prosecutor Tuesday urged jurors to reject their tale of fear, molestation and child abuse as “a pack of lies” and “a crazy story” designed to make jurors hate the slain parents.

The defense strategy, Deputy Dist. Atty David P. Conn said as closing arguments began, was to put the parents on trial as well as to deflect responsibility.

“To get you to hate the victims in this case, Erik Menendez accused his parents of one of the most horrible crimes imaginable--sexual abuse,” Conn told the jury hearing the brothers’ retrial for the 1989 shotgun slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez.

Closing arguments began over unsuccessful defense objections that the trial should be put on hold until higher courts can rule on the defense’s objections to a key decision Friday by Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg.

Weisberg’s ruling cut out the heart of the defense case, making it impossible for jurors to consider the brothers’ assertion that they killed their parents out of fear that the parents were about to kill them. The ruling eliminated the possibility of lesser manslaughter verdicts in the slaying of Kitty Menendez.

In two hours of closing arguments, which will continue today, Conn laid into the controversial defense, dubbed the “abuse excuse.” Erik Menendez slumped and cast his eyes downward, while brother Lyle’s eyes followed Conn as the prosecutor paced before the jury.

“This defense that was given to you was 100%, total fabrication. It was made up of whole cloth,” Conn said.

He asked the jury to instead hold the brothers accountable for their actions and convict them of first-degree murder in the slayings of their father, a dynamic entertainment executive, and mother, a former small-town beauty queen.

Conn cited these words, spoken by Lyle Menendez on Dec. 11, 1989, to Beverly Hills psychologist L. Jerome Oziel, as evidence that the killings were premeditated murder:

“There’s no way I was going to make a decision to kill my mother without Erik’s consent. I just let him sleep on it for a couple of days.”

Uttered “long before there was the abuse excuse,” Conn said, that statement is “absolute proof positive of premeditation.”

“This is a prosecutor’s dream statement,” he added. “ ‘I just let him sleep on it for a couple of days.’ If you have two days to think about it, you’re going to weigh and consider it. Obviously, that is premeditated murder.”

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Time and again, Conn attacked the story line that was the cornerstone of the brothers’ defense at both trials. At the retrial, Erik Menendez told the tale while Lyle Menendez remained silent at the defense table. Both brothers had testified tearfully at the first trial, which ended two years ago in deadlocked juries.

At the retrial, Erik Menendez testified that his father sexually molested him from age 6 to 18, and that his mother disclosed several days before the killings that she had known of the abuse all along but looked the other way. His story was rich with details.

He also testified that his brother’s threat to disclose the incest secret to others touched off a weeklong, escalating family crisis, making him so fearful that he believed that he had to kill his parents before they killed him.

“It is the silliest, most ridiculous story ever told in a courtroom,” Conn told the jury Tuesday.

The prosecutor said that Erik Menendez tried to persuade jurors that he was upset and in a panic, but that his actions show otherwise.

“Erik and Lyle Menendez were outside their house with loaded guns,” Conn said. “They decided to come into the house and shoot their parents to death. So how could that be? The defense story makes no sense.”

Earlier in the day, defense attorneys failed to persuade the 2nd District Court of Appeal to overturn Weisberg’s Friday ruling.

The appellate court issued a four-line order rejecting the defense’s argument that the Menendez jurors should have a broader range of choices than Weisberg gave them. Justices Paul Turner, Margaret M. Grignon and Orville A. Armstrong said it was impossible to decide whether Weisberg made an error in giving jury instructions until the case is over.

Defense lawyers promptly filed another appeal to the state Supreme Court. They noted that in the O.J. Simpson case, justices from the same appellate court blocked Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito from giving a jury instruction that related to police Det. Mark Fuhrman.

In the Simpson case, the 2nd District Court acted upon a prosecution appeal.

“If you don’t think there’s a double standard out there for the defense and the prosecution, look at this,” said one of Lyle Menendez’s attorneys, Deputy Public Defender Alex Ricciardulli.

In his rulings Friday, Weisberg flatly rejected the legal concept at the core of the defense case.

The brothers maintain that they killed their parents while in fear for their own lives--a fear they held, but that a reasonable person in the same situation might not have felt.

The law calls that “imperfect self-defense” and allows jurors to label such a slaying manslaughter instead of murder.

But Weisberg ruled that the brothers did not produce appropriate evidence at the second trial on that point.

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In the appellate brief, defense lawyers countered that legal precedent did not require them to produce such evidence. And if it did, they said, they had done so.

For instance, the brief argued, Erik Menendez testified that just before the brothers opened fire, Jose Menendez was standing and approaching him in the TV room of the family’s Beverly Hills estate.

Weisberg also ruled Friday that there would be no instruction given to jurors that the killing of Kitty Menendez was conducted in the “heat of passion” and therefore could be ruled manslaughter instead of murder.

Defense lawyers responded in the brief that the record was “replete with acts of abuse and degradation” by Kitty Menendez that would stoke anyone’s passions.

A few days before the killings, for example, in “an irate rage [she] ripped Lyle’s hairpiece off his head and threw it at Lyle, causing Lyle to cry,” the defense brief said.