Jury Asked to Spare Menendez Brothers

Defense attorneys fighting to save the lives of Lyle and Erik Menendez urged jurors Wednesday to spare the brothers and look to the warped values of a highly dysfunctional family to explain why they murdered their millionaire parents.

Weeping and wiping at her eyes, the older sister of Jose Menendez told jurors that executing her brother’s murderers would mean “the destruction of that side of my family: Jose, Kitty and the two kids.”

“It’s just wiping out the rest of my family,” Teresita Baralt explained through her tears as the penalty phase of the Menendez brothers’ murder trial began in Van Nuys Superior Court.

“Do you want Lyle and Erik Menendez to live?” defense attorney Terri Towery asked softly.

“Yes,” replied Baralt, who is Lyle’s godmother and was the first witness to take the stand. She said she was speaking for the entire family, including the brothers’ paternal grandmother, Maria Carlotta Menendez, 78.

And so, the Menendez legal drama entered a more dramatic stage in which the jury will decide the brothers’ punishment: life in prison or death by lethal injection.

The penalty phase brought out Menendez friends, family members and supporters in force, and so many representatives of the national media that some were turned away as the tiny courtroom’s 15 media seats quickly filled.

Describing a series of photographs depicting the brothers as youngsters, Baralt testified about their early upbringing. She recalled how Kitty Menendez coddled and cooed to the family’s succession of pet ferrets, but never showed her sons the same affection. Asked why not, Baralt said: “Because they were boys.”

She said Erik, as a toddler, freed himself from his crib and walked across the street to her house one day at 7 a.m., knocking on the back door for food. When she called the Menendez house, she said, Kitty insisted that Erik still was in his crib.

Baralt said the boys’ father told his sons when they lost at sporting matches that “God loves winners. Nobody remembers second-best.”

Finally, she said, she stopped attending the tennis matches because “the tension, the emphasis, it could have been the Olympics. I couldn’t take it.”

In their opening statements to the jury, defense attorneys launched their fight to save the lives of Lyle, 28, and Erik, 25. The same jury convicted the brothers a week ago of first-degree murder with special circumstances and conspiracy for the August 1989 shotgun slayings of their millionaire parents at the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.

Lyle’s lawyer, Charles Gessler, a deputy public defender whom colleagues consider the dean of Los Angeles death penalty lawyers, was barely audible as he told jurors that Lyle was raised “like a prize thoroughbred” and that the murders were the product of “terrible misjudgments made by the parents,” who believed “winning was everything.”

Lyle did grow up to become the No. 1 ranked junior tennis player in New Jersey, but he learned no other skills or values, Gessler said. His parents completed his school assignments for him and, so he wouldn’t lose his competitive edge, they discouraged him from making friends, Gessler said.

“I do not want you to think I’m telling you this to parent-bash or victim-bash,” he told the jury. “I’m not doing this to say Jose and [Kitty] Menendez were terrible people. But look at [Lyle’s] life, look at him as an individual and how he became that way.”

Defense attorney Leslie Abramson told jurors, “This is an awful waste and tragedy of four people, four lives, and they were lives full of promise and talent. All four of those lives are over.”

She said her client, Erik, is remorseful and reminded the jury that the burden of guilt caused him to confess the crimes to a Beverly Hills psychotherapist.