HUNG JURY: The Diary of a Menendez...

HUNG JURY: The Diary of a Menendez Juror by Hazel Thornton (Temple University Press: $14.95; 174 pp.). This month’s guilty verdicts and the penalty phase of the Menendez brothers’ second murder trial give new relevance to Hazel Thornton’s account of serving on the jury at Erik Menendez’s first trial. She offers few revelations into the highly publicized case, but her daily entries give insights into the grueling marathon the trial became. The jurors had to grapple with questions of guilt and innocence as well as the psychological problems of spending weeks with people they didn’t know or like. Thornton points out that the panel split not over whether Erik was guilty but over whether to convict him of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter.