Word: jose
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...battered-child-syndrome defense. (A variant, the battered-wife defense, is sometimes used by women who kill abusive husbands.) The Menendez brothers contend that they killed their parents not to avenge years of sexual and emotional torture -- that would be no legal justification -- but in self-defense. Even though Jose and Kitty were sitting placidly watching television? Yes. The law sometimes recognizes self- defense pleas from people who are not under attack but who reasonably fear imminent death unless they get their potential assailants first. The battered- child-syndrome defense holds that a child can be so terrorized by years...
...Menendez case originally looked much simpler. When Jose, 45, a Cuban refugee who had become the wealthy chief of a music- and video-distribution business, and Kitty, 44, a onetime beauty queen, were gunned down, the first suspicion was of a Mafia hit. But the mangled condition of the bodies argued for a motive of hatred rather than business. Though they pretended to discover the bodies, Lyle, then 21, and Erik, 18, did not put on a very convincing show of grief; they went on a $700,000 spending spree with the insurance money. In March 1990, Judalon Smyth told...
Lyle has been painting a picture of Jose and Kitty as monsters who ran their sons' lives in the tiniest detail, crushing any aspirations to independence by handing out cruel punishments for trivial offenses. Much worse, he testified, when he was seven, Jose "would be in the bathroom, and he'd put me on my knees. He'd guide me in all my movements, and I'd have oral sex with him." Also, "he used objects, a toothbrush, some sort of utensil brush . . . he'd take my pants off, lay me on the bed. He'd have a tube...
...that, if Lyle is to be believed, started the fatal sequence. Moved by his brother's pain and embarrassment over the toupee incident, Erik impulsively confessed to Lyle that Jose was continuing his sexual abuse of the younger brother. Two days later, said Lyle, he confronted Jose and told his father to leave Erik alone, which started three days of escalating arguments. Jose, according to Lyle, told him, "What I do with my son is my own business. Don't throw your life away. Stay out of it." Lyle interpreted that and some later remarks by his father, he said...
...Sunday morning, after another alleged attempt by Jose to enter Erik's room, the brothers concluded that Erik had to get out of the house. Lyle, making conversation, asked his father for the phone number of a tennis camp he planned to attend. Jose replied, "What does it matter anymore?" Lyle said he took that "to be my dad's sarcastic way of saying, 'You're dead!' " The boys told Kitty they were going out to meet some friends; she ordered them to stay in the house. Jose told Erik to go upstairs and wait for him. Lyle screamed...