Feel Erik Menendez’s Fear, Jury Told : Trial: Attorney urges jurors to convict younger brother of manslaughter, not murder, in the slaying of parents. She likens the father to a mad scientist who treated sons like lab animals.

Though conceding that she faces a tough sell, defense attorney Leslie Abramson pleaded with jurors Tuesday to “put yourself in Erik Menendez’s shoes” and feel the fear that led him and his brother to kill their parents.

Abramson, who began her closing statement Monday afternoon, commanded the courtroom stage for the entire day--sniping at prosecutors, attacking the character of the dead parents and urging jurors to go easy on Erik Menendez by convicting him of manslaughter, not murder.

She is expected to complete her argument this morning, after which prosecutors get one last shot at rebuttal. Following legal instructions by the judge, the fate of both Erik and Lyle Menendez then will be in the hands of jurors.

With her voice booming across the courtroom, Abramson on Tuesday heaped scorn on both Jose and Kitty Menendez, comparing him to a mad scientist trying to produce perfect sons, like they were “his little laboratory animals.” The Menendez mother, Abramson said, was a suicidal enigma with “her own version of torture and torment.”

Abramson insisted that the younger Menendez brother loved his parents. But she said he knew only one emotion from a lifetime of sexual abuse--terror.

When the brothers threatened to tell outsiders about the abuse, Abramson told jurors, it sparked a “crisis of monumental import and significance” that ended Aug. 20, 1989, when the brothers shotgunned their parents in the TV room of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.

“Only the revelation of the molestation secret makes sense with why this happened then,” she said.

Later, looking at jurors, at least two of whom were listening with folded arms, Abramson implored: “I ask you to indulge me and indulge Erik Menendez.”

“I can tell some of you are very resistant to what I’m saying,” Abramson said, adding moments later: “You must entertain the possibility I’m telling the truth.”

Erik Menendez, 23, and Lyle Menendez, 25, are charged with first-degree murder. If convicted, they could draw the death penalty.

Prosecutors, who made only a two-hour initial statement to jurors Monday, have belittled the defense claim of abuse as a fiction. They contend that the brothers killed out of hatred and greed.

Two juries are hearing the case because some evidence is admissible against only one brother. The jury considering Lyle Menendez’s case deliberated for a third day Tuesday on a different floor of the Van Nuys courthouse.

As she did the day before, Abramson urged Erik Menendez’s jury to judge him separately from his brother. It was Lyle Menendez, she reminded jurors, who fired shots at close range to the back of his father’s head and to his mother’s cheek.

Erik Menendez’s liability, she asserted, is only as an “aider and abettor.” She declared, “There’s no evidence in this case that Erik killed anybody.”

She also recalled that it was Lyle Menendez who, four days after the slayings, spent $15,039 on three Rolex watches and money clips, then gave Erik Menendez one of the watches.

Speaking of Erik Menendez, she told jurors, “If you want to believe he killed his parents so he could get a stainless steel Rolex, I can’t stop you.”

He killed in fear, she said, because he grew up in a “family environment run by fear.”

Abramson recalled Erik Menendez’s testimony that his father molested him for 12 years. Jose Menendez, she said, violated the “fundamental rule of father, God, nature.”

The abuse was corroborated in court, she asserted, when a cousin testified that Erik Menendez, at age 13, asked him whether the “massages” he was getting were normal.

And Erik Menendez, she reminded jurors, said that he flavored his father’s coffee with cinnamon to make oral sex more palatable. “That’s the kind of fact you wouldn’t expect someone making up a story to make up,” she said.

The defense generally has portrayed Jose Menendez as the most oppressive parent, but Abramson said Kitty Menendez committed the “betrayal of the worst kind” when she told her son--three nights before the slayings--that she had known about the abuse all along.

Abramson asked jurors to imagine that from Erik Menendez’s point of view: “If she could let that happen to you, why couldn’t she kill you?”

“There really is good and evil in this world,” Abramson said, adding moments later: “Sadly enough, given where we are, Erik Menendez is a good person who did a bad thing. And you cannot, cannot judge the sinner by the sin alone.”

Abramson took several shots at the prosecution, mocking their contention that the abuse “didn’t happen, didn’t happen, didn’t happen.” Still, she said, the two prosecutors in the case were not “half as bad” as Jose and Kitty Menendez.

She predicted, however, that Deputy Dist. Atty. Lester Kuriyama will make a “revolting suggestion” in his final argument today, one “akin to blaming the victim.”

Kuriyama declined to respond to the prediction after court, but it was an apparent reference to a prosecution theory hinted at during testimony and mentioned in closing statements to Lyle Menendez’s jury: that the real cause of friction between Jose Menendez and his younger son was the father’s belief that Erik Menendez was gay.