Menendez Brothers' Trials: 1993-94 & 1995-96

The trials cost the brothers their inheritance; the vast Menendez fortune was now depleted. Public defenders were appointed to represent Lyle. Erik pleaded with the judge for the State of California to pay his legal fees so that he could retain Abramson as his lawyer. The judge refused. After some grumbling about what a sacrifice it would be, Abramson agreed to stay on the case for a reduced fee.

If the Menendez brothers had killed their parents for money, their reward had vanished. In September 1994, the Menendez mansion was sold at auction for $1.3 million. The money was split between creditors and the county, which demanded restitution for the cost of the defendants' lengthy incarceration. Even their notorious celebrity dimmed. Although the trial of Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss and the Menendez brothers' second pretrial hearings were held in the Los Angeles County Courthouse, both legal proceedings were largely ignored by the media, whose attentions had moved en masse to the O.J. Simpson murder trial being held in the same building. Coincidentally, Simpson had visited the Menendez family in the days when he was sprinting though airports in Hertz commercials. Jose Menendez, then a prominent Hertz executive, invited the former football star to dinner so that his sons could meet him. According to Vanity Fair (February 1995), Simpson and the Menendez brothers did not meet again until "they were all in the celebrity section of the Los Angeles County Jail, all three charged with double murder."

On April 3 Judge Stanley Weisberg ruled that the brothers would be retried together and in front of a single jury. Judicial discipline and shifts in the defense strategy reduced the potential for sensationalism in the second trial, which Weisberg ruled would be heard by a single jury. The judge banned television cameras from the courtroom. By restricting testimony only to events relevant to Erik and Lyle's state of mind just the week before the killings, the judge eliminated a potential parade of defense witnesses who were called in the first trial to bolster the brothers' allegations that their father was an abusive tyrant.

The most damaging blow to the defense was Judge Weisberg's ruling that the principle of "imperfect self-defense," which had previously been argued so effectively, was inapplicable. Citing a footnote in a Supreme Court decision rendered in another case after the first trial, the judge determined that the principle could not be applied to the retrial because the defense had failed to provide sufficient evidence that Kitty Menendez had treated her sons in any way that might have provoked them to kill her. This time neither Erik nor Lyle took the stand, thus eliminating any tearful testimony of abuse by their father and additionally negating the risk of being cross-examined about the truthfulness of such accusations.

On March 20, 1996, after 16 hours of deliberation, the jury found Lyle and Erik guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances. The verdict left the brothers liable to either life imprisonment or death by lethal injection. The jurors, who had expressed uncertainty over the allegations of child abuse, decided against recommending the death penalty. On July 2, Judge Weisberg accepted the jury's advice. The Menendez brothers were each sentenced to serve two consecutive terms of life imprisonment, thus bringing to a close a long and sad story of familial relations gone terribly wrong.