District attorney will ask court to resentence Menendez brothers

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County district attorney said Thursday that he would request the resentencing of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who killed their parents in 1989, a step that could lead to their release from prison.

The district attorney, George Gascón, announced his decision at a news conference at the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles.

“I believe that they have paid their debt to society,” he said.

Gascón, who was surrounded by members of his office and members of the Menendez family, said he would ask the court Friday to resentence the brothers to a murder charge that comes with the possibility of parole.

It is not clear when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge will decide on the resentencing request. If a judge agrees with Gascón, the brothers would have to appear before a parole board. But the reviews by the court and the parole board could take many more weeks and the brothers’ release is far from guaranteed.

The district attorney noted that there was disagreement in his office about whether to move forward with the resentencing. He cited a recent documentary that he said “brought a tremendous amount of public attention” and requests for information.

During their first trial in the early 1990s, which was televised, the brothers said they had been sexually molested by their father and feared for their lives. At the time, their claims were met with widespread skepticism. But Gascón said that he was ultimately convinced by the prosecutors in his office reviewing the case to ask the court for reconsideration, and that he believed the molestation claims.

The brothers are serving sentences of life without parole in a state prison near San Diego.

Gascón said that he would ask for them to be sentenced to 50 years to life with the possibility of parole. That term would still be longer than what the brothers have already served, but they would be eligible for parole immediately under state law because they committed the crimes when they were younger than 26.

“Today is a day filled with hope for our family,” Anamaria Baralt, a niece of Jose Menendez, said at the news conference. “We stand united in our hope and gratitude. Together we can make sure that Erik and Lyle can receive the justice they deserve and finally come home.”

The case drew renewed attention this year after Netflix released a docudrama about it, and later a documentary in which the brothers discussed the case at length in prison interviews.

The rare request for resentencing comes at an urgent political moment for Gascón, a Democrat who is struggling to win reelection against a conservative challenger running as an independent in the left-leaning county. Gascón on Thursday deflected questions about whether his decision was politically driven, saying, “I am not going to talk about reelection.”

His opponent, Nathan Hochman, said in a statement Thursday that Gascón “has cast a cloud over the fairness and impartiality of his decision” by issuing it days before the Nov. 5 election.

Laurie L. Levenson, a professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who frequently analyzed the Menendez case for media outlets in the 1990s, said that Gascón “took the safest route: Leave it to the parole commission.”

The murders grabbed the nation’s attention in 1989 for their lurid nature and the wealthy milieu in which they were committed. The brothers’ initial trial in the early 1990s was one of the first to be televised to a national audience, a forerunner of the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, also in Los Angeles County.

The Menendez brothers had separate juries in their first trial, and a judge declared a mistrial after both juries had failed to reach unanimous verdicts, following weeks of deliberations. When the brothers were tried again — this time without TV cameras present — they were both convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Erik Menendez was 18 and his brother, Lyle, was 21 at the time of the murders.

At trial, prosecutors portrayed the brothers as unrepentant killers who murdered their parents with shotguns to get their hands on the family’s assets, valued at the time at $14 million (about $32 million in today’s dollars). A spending spree by the brothers in the months between the murders and their arrest, in which they bought a Porsche car, a Rolex watch, and a restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey, was presented as evidence to support that theory.

The brothers’ defense team argued that they had been sexually abused by their father, Jose Menendez, and that their mother, Kitty Menendez, knew about it. The lawyers said the brothers killed their parents because they feared for their lives. The brothers had confronted their parents about the abuse, the lawyers said, and were worried that their parents would kill them to prevent the family’s secrets from becoming public.

During the first trial, which ended in a mistrial in 1994, evidence was admitted supporting the brothers’ contention that they had been abused. But in the second trial, the judge excluded much of that evidence — which was dismissed at the time by some legal experts as the brothers’ “abuse excuse” — and the brothers were convicted.

“If Lyle and Erik’s case were heard today, with the understanding we now have about abuse and PTSD, there is no doubt in my mind that their sentencing would have been very different,” Baralt, a cousin of the brothers, said at a recent news conference held by the family.

New evidence has come to light in recent years. A letter written by Erik Menendez months before the murders, in which he described the sexual abuse to a cousin, was brought forward by Robert Rand, a journalist who has covered the case for years and has written a book about it. In addition, a 2023 documentary series on the Peacock streaming service reported allegations that Jose, a wealthy music executive, had sexually abused Roy Rosselló, a member of the boy band Menudo.

The brothers, their legal team and their extended family believe that if the evidence and testimony about the abuse had been admitted at the second trial, it would have been seen as a mitigating factor, and the brothers would have been found guilty of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder.

Nery Ynclan, one of the journalists whose reporting powered the Peacock series, “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed,” said that lawyers for years cautioned against becoming too hopeful about the brothers ever being freed.

“Today is a victory for Lyle, Erik and Roy,” she said, “three men who found a way to process the pain of their horrendous childhoods by helping others deal with their traumas.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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