It has become an increasingly popular defense to gain an acquittal or an inconsequential verdict for the most heinous of crimes. But it is also a subject that is being ludicrously overworked in the justice system. It is a subject that must be reckoned with. Today, statistics indicate that more than three American children die each day from abuse or neglect. The obligatory conversation between us which might have heralded an understanding for the future was never held. He died before any rapprochement was made. When I returned, the medal I wore on my chest, pinned on by a general after an incident in battle, changed the dynamic between my father and me. Although the beatings eventually stopped, the mockery continued until the day my father delivered me to the induction center in New Haven, Connecticut, when I was 18 years old, to go off and serve in World War II. I embarrassed my father, a prominent heart surgeon in Hartford, Connecticut, who was otherwise a loved and highly respected figure. To this day I remain partially deaf from a blow to the ear when I was in the fifth grade. I was beaten with straps, hangers, and riding crops. I was not abused sexually, but physically and psychologically. I was abused as a child, although the term “child abuse” was not in use at the time.
Lest I be grouped in that contemptible circle of people Abramson calls uneducable on the subject, those people who cannot and will not understand the gravity of child abuse, I feel reluctantly obliged to reveal my own deep secret on that matter.
In the final family irony, the hard-earned fortune of Jose Menendez, a Cuban immigrant who had made good, paid for the high-priced legal team that was expected to get his sons forgiven again. The parents had paid off for them, and made the major parental error of not dealing with the problems that caused the transgressions. The parents they killed had already forgiven them their trespasses during their flirtation with criminal life, trespasses that would have put less fortunate young men in reform schools or jails. Throughout, the brothers acted as if forgiveness were their due. Rarely have parents been so defiled by their children, or victims by their killers. “Cry for what has been done to us, not for what we have done to others” seemed to be the bottom line of their testimony and their courtroom presence. I found myself to be both repulsed and fascinated by the Menendez brothers. Leslie Abramson, quoted by Gay Jervey, The American Lawyer, May 1991. Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re a victim, a saint. And their so-called victims are nothing short of monsters who deserved to be stopped. I mean, you have these clients who are not criminals, but sympathetic, decent people who are in terrible trouble. Look how compelling these abuse cases are. Her amazing persuasive powers convinced a great many people that the molestation had taken place. Abramson’s job, however, was not to educate jurors. Their names were not even mentioned in the interview. That two people had been brutally slain seemed to be a matter of irrelevance. In a post-trial interview with Terry Moran on Court TV, Leslie Abramson, with a patient smile and a dismissive they-don’t-get-it shake of her head, called those jurors who held out for a murder conviction “uneducable,” as if their minds were too dim to understand the consequences of abuse. “And you can print that,” she snapped at one reporter in the elevator after her attack on the judge. Weisberg, who had made a ruling in which she didn’t agree. She reserved the other for Judge Stanley M. Jerome Oziel, to whom the killers had confessed their crime. She reserved one for the prosecution’s chief witness, Dr. Even the two well-known but uncivilized words ending with u-c-k-e-r were not alien to her vocabulary. She was also mean, harsh, crude, and gutter-mouthed.
Those who went along with the defense were in the thrall of a tiny, mesmerizing, brilliant, overpowering 50-year-old woman who dominated the proceedings from the beginning to the end of a six-month trial, leaving everyone in the dust behind her. Two juries made up of people the killers privately expressed to friends and confidants they didn’t quite consider to be their peers fell for their pretty faces, their crocodile tears, and their extravagant lies.
Two juries took the word of two world-class liars, two rich, spoiled, arrogant losers who were already on the road to a criminal life when they shot their mother’s face off and their father’s brains out. So what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Steven Brill, creator of Court TV, on Charlie Rose, That they were abused, and there’s no reason to think they wereĪbused. We’ve all made a mistake, or most of us have, which is we’ve assumed There are people who think these kids should get the Nobel Prize.