In a matter of days, the nation will find out if triple killer Lindsay Clancy is free from charges via the declared mistrial on September 4, or if she will be tried a second time. Either way, the American jury system has been taking some hard hits.

Decades ago, highly publicized court cases saw lawyers defending clients accused of murder by turning to a new line of defense, dubbed the “abuse excuse.” The argument was, “My client, otherwise a normal, rational, decent human being, was abused for years by his or her spouse, parents, sibling, coworker, or whomever.”

A noteworthy case was that of the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, who feared and then murdered their parents in their Beverly Hills home in August 1989. They claimed to have suffered years of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse and that they believed their parents were about to kill them.

The first trial ended in January 1994, with the juries deadlocked between murder and lesser manslaughter charges. At the retrial, prosecutors restricted much of the abuse-related testimony and focused more directly on the killings. In March 1996, both brothers were convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Harvard Law professor and defense attorney Alan Dershowitz wrote about the subject in "The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility," published in 1994.

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The Menendez retrial demonstrated........

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