Abramson Goes on Attack in Speech to Menendez Jury

Backed into a corner by adverse legal rulings, but unbowed and nowhere near conceding defeat in the retrial of the Menendez brothers, defense attorney Leslie Abramson came out swinging Monday, seeking acquittal for Erik Menendez during what she says might be the final closing argument of her 27-year legal career.

At one point during her argument, Abramson shouted and pounded her fists on the podium. Pointing at Deputy Dist. Attys. David P. Conn and Carol Najera, Abramson yelled: “These people here only care about winning. They don’t care about love. They don’t care about tragedy.”

Later, she told jurors, “This is a real desperation prosecution.”

While Abramson once had argued for manslaughter verdicts in the Menendez case, a court ruling a week ago raised the stakes by eliminating the lesser verdicts in the slaying of Kitty Menendez and making them more difficult to obtain in the slaying of Jose Menendez. Abramson said outside court that she will ask the jury today to acquit her client.

She also said she has not taken any new clients, and that this trial will be her last “if I’m lucky.” She said plans for a proposed television talk show had been put on hold until after the trial.

Erik and Lyle Menendez are charged with murder in the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of their wealthy parents, and prosecutors will seek the death penalty if the jury finds the brothers guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances. The first trial ended in jury deadlock two years ago.

Abramson, who described herself to jurors as “an attack dog,” said Conn had lied to the jury in his desperation to win. Then she called Jose Menendez a sadistic brute and asked, “What kind of a success is a man who is killed by his own children?”

Finally, she compared the two, attempting to cast the prosecutor in the same light as the controlling patriarch who, she said, “enjoyed best hurting the weakest people.”

Abramson asked jurors to keep the actions of Erik Menendez separate from those of his older brother, Lyle. “Mr. Conn made up a new person during this trial,” she said. “I call him ‘Lylerik.’ That person doesn’t exist. There are two people here whose fate is in your hands. My client’s name is Erik Menendez.”

She suggested that Lyle, as the dominant older brother, had taken the lead in picking up the spent shotgun shells and covering up the crime while her client was emotionally devastated.

Abramson has long contended that Jose Menendez sexually molested Erik from the time he was 6 until a few days before the slayings. When Erik learned he would be living at home while attending UCLA, he disclosed the molestation to Lyle, she said.

Abramson excoriated the prosecution’s chief witness, Roger McCarthy, the head of a Silicon Valley engineering firm that created a computerized reconstruction of the shootings. She referred to McCarthy’s company, Failure Analysis Associates, as “Fraudulent Analysis.”

She was gentler with another prosecution witness, nationally noted forensic psychiatrist Park Elliott Dietz of Newport Beach, who testified that Erik Menendez suffered from a lifelong anxiety disorder. Dietz also testified that he wouldn’t say one way or the other whether Erik Menendez had been molested.

“The prosecution’s $40,000 witness confirmed the defense,” she said. “I didn’t have $40,000, but if I had, I would have paid him myself.”