Menendez Brothers Resentencing Supported by L.A. District Attorney George Gascón
Erik and Lyle Menendez may soon be released from prison, with Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón recommending that they be resentenced.
Gascón announced Thursday that his office will move for reconsideration of the decades-old case involving the brothers, who killed their parents in a salvo of shotgun blasts in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion. They’ve served 34 years in prison, exhausting all of their appeals in 2005.
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The recommendation for the brothers to be resentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole will be considered by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. From there, it will go to a parole board, which will determine whether they should be set free. They could immediately be eligible for parole.
“They have paid their debt to society, and the system provides a vehicle for their case to be reviewed,” Gascón said.
Ryan Murphy’s polarizing nine-part series following the 1989 killings of José and Kitty Menendez, a documentary and an army of TikTok supporters spurred renewed scrutiny into the trials, which was among the first to be nationally televised.
Earlier in October, Gascón said his office is reviewing the convictions. The reexamination relates to new evidence uncovered over the past year providing context to the crimes. Last year, Roy Rossello, a member of the boy band Menudo, disclosed in the Peacock documentary Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed that José Menendez, then president of RCA Records, sexually assaulted him when he was a minor. There’s also a letter written by Erik Menendez to his cousin Andy Cano corroborating accusations that he was sexually abused.
“I believe the brothers were subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction and molestation in their home,” Gascón said. “But they went to prison for life without the possibility of parole, which meant that, under law at the time, they had no hope of ever getting out.”
If evidence of sexual abuse was presented at their trial, the jury could’ve voted to convict for manslaughter, which would’ve allowed for the brothers’ release decades ago. Gascón, who could’ve recommended that the brothers be resentenced under convictions for manslaughter, said he opted not to do so because he didn’t think it would be the “appropriate” charge.
“These were clearly murders that were premeditated,” the district attorney explained.
After the first trial ended in a deadlocked jury, Lyle, then 21, and Erik Menendez, then 18, were convicted in 1996 on two counts of first-degree murder. So-called “special circumstances” for laying in wait for their victims served as the basis for the court sentencing each brother to two consecutive life terms in prison, though it declined to issue the death penalty.
Evidence of sexual abuse was severely limited in the retrial. In the first, the brothers acknowledged killing their parents but said they did so out in self-defense. They said they feared the couple was going to kill them to prevent them from revealing molestation by the father. In the second trial, The brothers were barred from presenting a so-called “imperfect self-defense” theory, which is the honest but unreasonable belief that an individual acted to protect their life.
“There was enough evidence of abuse that they should’ve been entitled to make those arguments,” says Joshua Ritter, a criminal defense attorney who spent nearly a decade at the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office.
Last year, lawyers for Lyle and Erik Menendez also filed a petition to review the brothers’ sentences that could’ve allowed for a retrial. Gascón opted to go another route by backing the reconsideration of their sentences, which is a much lower bar than is required for granting the petition.
The move from Gascón comes in the homestretch of his reelection campaign to stay Los Angeles’ top prosecutor. Throughout his career as district attorney of San Francisco and Los Angeles, he’s championed reducing mass incarceration and alternative sentencing measures. Some have criticized his initiatives for an uptick in crime across the region, though other areas — including Orange and Sacramento counties — with more conventional prosecutors have seen larger rises in violent crime, Gascón has repeatedly said. He trails challenger Nathan Hochman by more than 30 percentage points with just weeks remaining before the election, according to a survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.
Responding to speculation that he’s leveraging the case for political gain, Gascón said there’s “nothing political about this.” He added, “We’ve resentenced over 300 people, including 28 for murder.”
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