Menendez Brothers Juror Says Trial’s ‘Outcome Would Be Very Different’ Today
A juror on the Menendez brothers’ trial said she believes that today’s world would have been more understanding about the complexity of the trauma suffered by sexual abuse victims — and would have acquitted the brothers of the 1989 murder of 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” Friday.
The brothers claimed they acted in self-defense after years of sexual abuse by their father, José Menendez, when they gunned down him and their mother, Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, in their Beverly Hills home.