Actually no one, probably not even their own lawyers, expects the Menendez brothers to get off entirely. Before Lyle Menendez’s case went to the jury last Friday (a separate jury, which has sat in the same courtroom for most of the 21-week trial, will probably get Erik’s case this week), Judge Stanley Weisberg ruled that the defendants’ case did not meet California’s standard for “perfect self-defense”–the only legal theory under which they could have been acquitted. This requires showing that the defendants were in imminent fear for their lives, and that any reasonable person would have felt the same way. Weisberg allowed only the “imperfect self-defense” theory, which requires only that the defendants honestly believed their lives were endangered. Under state law this mitigates guilt but doesn’t erase it entirely. Jurors are technically free to find the brothers not guilty whether or not they have a legal theory on which to do it. But in practice the range of likely verdicts runs from first-degree murder, with the possible penalty of death, down to involuntary manslaughter, with a maximum term of four years.

That anyone is even talking about self-defense at this point represents a victory for the brothers’ formidable defense team, led by Jill Lansing and Leslie Abramson. Lyle and Erik, by their own account, didn’t kill Jose and Kitty Menendez during a fight; they sneaked up on them as they were eating ice cream and berries in the television room of their Beverly Hills mansion. The brothers didn’t exactly collapse in shock afterward, either; they left to establish an alibi and made a hysterical call to the police after pretending to discover the bodies. Then they went on a spending spree with the proceeds of a $650,000 life-insurance policy–Lyle buying, among other things, a $60,000 Porsche and a restaurant in Princeton, N.J. Even after they were arrested and jailed in 1990 (on a tip from the boys’ therapist’s girlfriend), the brothers continued to maintain their innocence until Judge Weisberg ruled that the state could use the most damning evidence against them, the therapist’s recordings of their confession. Only a month before the trial actually began did Lansing and Abramson unveil their new defense: that Lyle and Erik shot their parents after Jose threatened to kill them to keep secret his years of sexual abuse.

The great triumph of the defense was to convince many people who followed the trial that Jose really did molest Lyle as a youngster and Erik for 12 years, up until the very day of the shootings. Lansing entered into evidence pictures from a family album showing what she said was one of the boys naked from the chest down. But the prime evidence was the testimony of the brothers themselves, and the experts who interviewed them in jail. (The tape in which they discuss the murders with their therapist, made while they were still free, mentions nothing about incest or abuse.) Dabbing their eyes, biting their lips, the brothers described the horrifying life we have come to associate with the families of prominent businessmen, well-known politicians and nationally beloved movie stars. Jose, a wealthy executive in the video industry, was described as a revolting bully who jabbed Lyle with pins to get him to perform oral sex. Kitty, a conventional suburban matron, was portrayed as a hostile and eccentric alcoholic who would sometimes lock her children in their rooms until they were forced to defecate in plastic containers. The sins for which you could be punished in the Menendez home were numerous. On the tennis court, any time Lyle or Erik failed to play up to their parents’ expectations they received tongue-lashings hideous even by tennis-parent standards. “How many people do you know who would fit that list?” Lansing asked the jury, referring to a compendium of adjectives culled from numerous witnesses’ descriptions of Jose and Kitty (“assaultive, overbearing, intimidating, bizarre “And would you let them raise your children?”

Of course, vileness of the decedent is not a justification for murder. The defense theory rested on a sequence of events beginning with a family argument during which Kitty pulled the hairpiece off Lyle’s head, revealing to Erik for the first time that his brother was bald. In the confessional atmosphere that followed, Erik disclosed details of Jose’s sexual abuse, and when Lyle stood up for his brother, Jose warned him not to “throw his life away” by revealing the family’s secret. Convinced they were about to be killed, the brothers say they struck first to save their own lives.

How much of this the jury will believe, of course, remains to be seen. The cable channel Court TV, which has been carrying as much as eight hours a day of live Menendez coverage, reports getting 500 calls a week about the case, split almost evenly between those who accept the defense story and those who think Erik and Lyle are lying through their teeth (“if that’s really their teeth,” as one courtroom observer, Dick Cavett, remarked on the air last week). Even prosecutor Pamela Bozanich, summing up the case against Lyle last week, was forced to concede that Jose and Kitty “obviously had terrific flaws–most people do,” in the course of reminding jurors that the case was about murder, not child abuse. And she made one other significant concession. All along, the prosecution had described Lyle and Erik as motivated by greed for their parents’ $14 million estate. But in her closing argument, Bozanich described the murder as “more subtle” than “a classic murder for financial gain.” Lyle and Erik, she said, were afraid of being disinherited by their father and wanted to escape his control. Interestingly, Abramson had disclosed a week earlier that the estate might be much smaller than $14 million–that, in fact, after the brothers’ legal bills are paid there might be nothing left at all.

Which, if true, might be the final irony in a case rich in them–even involuntary manslaughter sometimes doesn’t pay. Only two people still alive know the truth of what went on behind the gates of the Menendez mansion–Erik and Lyle, sitting patiently in court with tans long gone, tennis games growing rusty, but their grievances as fresh as the day they were first sustained. A Sacco and Vanzetti for our time.