Defense Rests in Menendez Brothers’ Retrial

Lyle Menendez, whose tearful testimony about a family life fraught with cruelty and incest mesmerized a national television audience two years ago, kept his silence Wednesday as the defense rested at the brothers’ retrial in the 1989 murders of their wealthy parents.

Defense attorney Charles A. Gessler said Lyle, 28, did not testify because “there’s no need.” Instead, he will rely on the testimony of his younger brother Erik Menendez, which laid out the brothers’ defense that a lifetime of abuse caused them to kill because they feared for their lives.

A gambit by Erik’s attorneys to use Lyle’s televised testimony from the first trial also failed when Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg excluded it Wednesday.

“Perhaps I’m not properly attuned to the electronic age,” Weisberg said from the bench, finding that the defense’s proposed digitized method of presenting and editing the Court TV video was potentially distracting to jurors.

Also absent from the retrial were nearly 30 defense witnesses--such as experts, teachers, coaches and friends--who at the first trial wove in intricate detail the story of a success-oriented and highly dysfunctional family that hid its alleged abuse behind the walls of mansions from Princeton, N.J., to Beverly Hills.

Prompted by prosecutor David Conn’s objections, Weisberg, who presided over both trials, ruled that much of that testimony was irrelevant the second time around. Instead, he instructed defense attorneys to focus on the brothers’ states of mind, as reflected by the events of the week before the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of entertainment executive Jose Menendez, 45, and his wife, former beauty queen Kitty Menendez, 47.

“This is like the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the Menendez defense,” fiery defense attorney Leslie Abramson, who represented younger brother Erik Menendez at both trials, told reporters later.

“The judge just whittles away at our defense and makes it smaller and smaller and smaller,” she added. “He wants them convicted, if you haven’t noticed.”

But UCLA law professor Peter Arenella said the defense case appears largely intact.

“The jury has still heard the same basic story of a life history of abuse of both brothers, and of Lyle’s role in trying to protect Erik,” Arenella said. “The basic story line is the same, simply a mass of supporting detail was lost.”

Arenella said that if the jurors believe Erik, they still could judge Lyle more harshly, in effect “trading one brother for another” in a compromise verdict.

Much of the defense case relies on the credibility of Erik Menendez, 25, who has long been considered the more fragile, sympathetic brother, Arenella said. He spent 15 days on the witness stand, undergoing a withering cross-examination by Conn, who contends that the brothers’ abuse defense is fabricated.

As in the first trial, Erik Menendez testified that his father molested him from the time he was 6 until he killed his parents at age 18. He testified that Lyle had told him that he too was molested by their father between the ages of 6 and 8.

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Erik Menendez told the jury that he was sure his father was going to molest him, then kill him after a family confrontation the night of the slayings. Instead, he said, he and Lyle ran for their shotguns. After the shooting stopped, he said, he realized that his parents were unarmed and that he had made a terrible mistake.

The defense called a leading expert in post-traumatic stress disorder to support Erik Menendez’s testimony. The expert, John Wilson of Cleveland State University, testified that the younger Menendez brother suffered from the disorder--as well as a condition Wilson called battered person syndrome--before, during and after the slayings. Wilson testified that he believed Erik Menendez.

At a midday news conference, the defense team presented a united, and upbeat front even though much of their case had been streamlined by Weisberg’s rulings.

The defense maintains that Erik Menendez was a credible and effective witness. “He stood up to 15 days of abuse in that courtroom,” attorney Barry Levin said.

But defense lawyers said their case was gutted by rulings that kept dozens of defense witnesses off the stand as Weisberg found time after time that the proposed defense testimony was either too remote in time from the shootings or was potentially confusing.

“Of course it hurts us,” Abramson said. “This jury doesn’t have as much information as the last juries had. They haven’t been given a clear enough picture of who these parents were and who the children were and what the nature of their relationship was.”

After the brothers’ first trial ended in January 1993 with jurors deadlocked between murder and manslaughter convictions, a public backlash erupted over the controversial defense, dubbed the “abuse excuse.”

But Abramson has long maintained that abuse was not an excuse. Rather, she said, it provided the context for a fear so profound that it skewed the brothers’ perceptions of danger. Conditioned by a lifetime of abuse, the brothers, the defense contends, fired their 12-gauge shotguns under the misguided belief that their parents would kill them first to hush up the family’s incest secret.

The case, she said, was classic manslaughter.

But prosecutor Conn contends that the brothers killed methodically and with premeditation--buying the shotguns two days earlier, taking target practice and then ambushing and executing their parents. Lyle, he alleges, fired the coup de grace shots to the back of his wounded father’s head. He also reloaded and then fired the final shot into his mortally wounded mother’s cheek, Conn alleges.

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During the seven months between the slayings and the brothers’ arrests, they spent more than $1 million--buying a restaurant, sports cars, Rolex watches, condominiums and other luxuries. However, prosecutor Conn contends, they didn’t buy headstones for their parents’ graves.

Because he did not testify, Lyle Menendez did not open the door for expert witnesses and others to testify about his mental state. Instead, his lawyers may change tactics during their closing arguments, asserting that Lyle was so angered by the continued molestation of Erik that he killed his parents in the heat of passion.

The prosecution has begun its rebuttal in a case that could go to the jury by the end of the month.