Menendez Jury Begins Deliberations
After 20 weeks of argument and testimony, the jurors finally began deliberations Friday afternoon in the retrial of the Menendez brothers.
The seven men and five women retired to the jury room at lunchtime, taking with them nearly 450 exhibits illustrating the testimony of 64 witnesses. The jurors had spent the morning listening to Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg’s instructions on the law.
Lyle and Erik Menendez, ages 28 and 25, are charged with murder with special circumstances, which could lead to the death penalty for the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of their wealthy parents, entertainment executive Jose Menendez, 45, and his wife, Kitty, 47, a former small-town beauty queen.
Weisberg told the jurors they must not let themselves be influenced by emotion, sympathy or public opinion as they try to decide a case that split two juries between murder and manslaughter verdicts in January 1994 and fueled heated public debate.
This time, the jurors were not given instructions on manslaughter findings in the slaying of Kitty Menendez, limiting their options to convicting the brothers of first-degree or second-degree murder, or acquitting them.
Jurors can convict the brothers of the lesser manslaughter charge in the slaying of Jose Menendez only if they find the father provoked his sons to the point where they shot him in the heat of passion.
The prosecution and defense completed closing arguments Thursday. Defense attorneys Leslie H. Abramson, for Erik, and Charles A. Gessler, for Lyle, argued for acquittals, but told jurors that justice would be served if their clients were convicted only of manslaughter in the slaying of Jose Menendez.
Attempting to counter that prospect, Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn showed the jurors a photograph of Kitty Menendez’s face in death, one eye gone, and her nose and cheek ravaged by the barrage of buckshot.
“How could they do this to their mother?” he asked.
Although Lyle Menendez did not testify at the retrial, Erik told essentially the same story both brothers related at the first trial. He said they killed their parents “because we were afraid.”
Erik Menendez testified that he and his brother feared that their parents were about to kill them to hush up a family incest scandal.
Outside the courtroom, defense attorney Abramson said that Erik Menendez said the retrial was an ordeal. “This is the most bizarre trial I have ever participated in,” she said. “It was hell.”
She added that the prosecution’s case was characterized by “junk science, extremist views and desperation to win.”
Noting prosecutors’ string of high-profile losses--most recently the O.J. Simpson and Snoop Doggy Dogg murder trials--she quipped, “Win one for the Gipper, that’s what this prosecution was all about.”