The Abuse Excuse (and Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories and Evasions of Responsibility), by Alan M. Dershowitz (Back Bay Books, $12.95).

Although the title may suggest that you've read or heard all this before, chances are you have not encountered it in terms of how the law is being violated in many high-profile cases.

The Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, for example. That case, writes Dershowitz "is a paradigm of the abusive and successful employment of the abuse excuse. . . .

"It is certainly possible--and in my view highly likely--that the Menendez brothers concocted out of whole cloth the entire story of

sexual abuse by their father. The fact that while confiding their carefully planned killing to a trusted psychologist, they never mentioned the alleged history of the abuse is strong evidence of its falsity. So is the fact that Erik chose to attend UCLA, which is near the Menendez home, rather than Berkeley, which is hundreds of miles away--at a time he claimed to be trying to escape the ongoing abuse.

"But even assuming that the story of abuse was entirely true, how does that justify, excuse, or even mitigate the culpability of Lyle and Erik Menendez for their carefully planned execution of both their parents and their lengthy cover-up of the killings? Their lawyers claimed self-defense, despite the ease with which the brothers could have left home, moved to another part of the country or the world, and escaped the alleged abuse. Even if they believed that their father and mother would hunt them down and kill them, they could have sought police protection. Instead, they decided to take the law into their own hands, shopped for weapons, plotted a `perfect' double murder, executed a cover-up, and--perhaps--contrived an abuse excuse defense in the event they were caught."

Dershowitz's point is that none of the criteria for justification (such as self-defense), for a legal excuse (such an accidental killing, which may be a legal defense but still deserves condemnation) or a mitigation (such as killing when provoked, which might reduce the charge from murder to manslaughter) were present in the Menendez case. What the brothers did was take the law into their own hands (and get away with it because their attorneys put the dead father on trial) and that, Dershowitz reminds us, is vigilantism. The same argument holds in the case of Lorena Bobbitt. Her husband was sleeping when she sliced off his penis.

"Vigilantism--whether it takes the old-fashioned form of the lynch mob or the new-fashioned form of the abuse victim's her sleeping husband--threatens the very fabric of our democracy and sows the seeds of anarchy and autocracy," Dershowitz writes.

"The other characteristic shared by defenses is that they are often `politically correct,' thus reflecting the current trend toward employing different criteria of culpability when judging disadvantaged groups."

"It is virtually impossible," he continues, "to flip the TV channels during the daytime hours without seeing a bevy of sobbing women and men justifying their failed lives by reference to some past abuse, real or imagined. Personal responsibility does not sell soap as well as sob stories. Jurors who watch this stuff begin to believe it. . . . They are thus receptive to it in the courtroom, especially when the defendant is portrayed sympathetically, and his dead victim is unsympathetic. . . . But neither public opinion polls nor TV talk shows establish the empirical or normative validity of such abuse-excuse defenses. The basic fallacy underlying each of them is that the vast majority of people who have experienced abuses--whether it be sexual, racial, or anything else--do not commit violent crimes."

Later in the book, Dershowitz takes up the "everyone does it excuse" for official corruption, in which liberal Democrats and right-wing Republicans alike are scored. Whitewater and Waco, he argues, should have been investigated by outsiders, as the Republicans demanded, even though the Republicans had opposed the use of special counsel during the Reagan and Bush administrations when the Democrats had control of Congress. And now the Democrats have run their own investigations, as have the Republicans. This has become the way of the world when attack politics are brought to bear on politicians who invite it by running on claims of integrity, morality, etc., but poetic justice is all that it serves.