A juror on the Menendez brothers’ trial thinks today’s more educated and woke world could have saved them — after it was announced Thursday that new evidence claiming the pair were sexually abused will be reviewed 30 years after they were found guilty of killing their parents.
“If they were tried again, I do think that the outcome would be very different because people know more these days, people understand more these days,” Hazel Thornton, a juror from Lyle and Erik Menendez’s first trial, told NewsNation’s “Banfield.”
The Menendez brothers claimed they acted in self-defense after years of sexual abuse by their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, when they gunned them down in their Beverly Hills home in 1989 — but Thornton said the men on the jury didn’t buy it.
“But the men in the room, it was a classic battle of the sexes. The men did not believe that Jose had been abusing his sons,” Thornton, author of the book “Hung Jury: The Diary Of A Menendez Jury,” told guest host Laura Ingle.
Prosecutor Lester Kuriyama also brought up the idea that Erik was gay in his closing arguments, which Thornton said the jury’s male component may have also used against the defendants while deliberating.
“There was no evidence to back that up. It was just Lester’s theory that he threw out in closing arguments, and the men ran with that and never did back down and accept the fact that they may have been abused,” she continued.
Thornton hopes for a resentencing of the brothers — who were convicted in 1996 — and not a new trial.
“I hope they are not tried again. I hope they are simply resentenced because I think a new trial would cost millions of dollars and wear everybody out for no good reason.”
