Los Angeles’s new tough-on-crime district attorney made clear on Friday he is taking a much less sympathetic view of Erik and Lyle Menendez’s case, though his office has not yet announced what position it will take on the issue of whether the brothers should be resentenced.
Erik, 53, and Lyle, 56, Menendez were found guilty of first-degree murder in the killings of José and Kitty Menendez in 1989, and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The defense said the brothers feared their parents were going to kill them to cover up years of sexual, psychological and physical abuse. Prosecutors portrayed the brothers, sons of a media executive, as motivated by greed for their multimillion-dollar inheritance. They repeatedly appealed against their convictions without success.
District attorney Nathan Hochman said at a press conference on Friday that he does not believe that Erik and Lyle Menendez deserve a new trial – which they petitioned for in 2023 – and cast doubt on the evidence corroborating the testimony that the two brothers were sexually abused by their father.
But he also said that he was not ready to announce whether or not his office would support a resentencing in their 1996 murder conviction, a decision that would involve more consideration of the brothers’ rehabilitation in the past 30 years in prison.
“Sexual abuse is abhorrent, and we will prosecute sexual abuse in any form it comes. While sexual abuse, in this situation, may have been a motivation for Erik and Lyle to do what they did, but it does not constitute self-defense,” Hochman said. Quoting a previous prosecutor on the case, he said: “Sexual abuse does not justify killing your parents.”
While the brother testified about the sexual abuse they said they had experienced, Hochman said: “When it came to any corroborating information about the sexual abuse, it was extremely lacking.”
Hochman also said the brothers did not initially talk about sexual abuse in their accounts of their parents’ killing: “It was their fourth version – they didn’t come out initially and say, ‘We killed our parents because our father sexually abused us.’”
California governor Gavin Newsom has “unilateral” power to commute the brothers’ sentence if he chooses to do so, Hochman said. “He has that power today.”
Last year, after more than three decades in prison, the brothers had seen major developments in their case, which had been put in the spotlight by a new documentary and a Ryan Murphy-produced Netflix series.
Hochman’s announcement comes four months after the city’s previous district attorney, the more politically progressive George Gascón, recommended that the brothers be resentenced, a move that supporters had hoped would lead to the brothers’ release.
Gascón had made clear that he supported clemency in the brothers’ case, though he reportedly said not every attorney in his office agreed with him.
“I do believe the brothers were subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the home, and molestation,” Gascón said in October. “They have been in prison for nearly 35 years. I believe that they have paid their debt to society.”
Some supporters had hoped the resentencing would mean the brothers could be released from prison and home by Thanksgiving or by Christmas 2024.
But the November election of Hochman, who who ran a tough-on-crime platform and ousted Gascón as district attorney, upended those expectations, as a judge in their case delayed a scheduled hearing to give Hochman more time to review the case and make his own recommendation.
On Friday, in his first public statement on the substance of the case, Hochman made clear his critical view about many aspects of the brothers’ behavior in the case, highlighting the brothers’ changing statements, their “lies”, and the brutality of the shotgun killings of their parents.
In a press conference that delved heavily into legal details of the case, Hochman said, “The court should deny the current habeas petition by the two brothers,” arguing that the new evidence that they brothers had presented in 2023 was not fresh, relevant, or substantive enough to merit a new trial. The district attorney’s office shared a video they had breaking down evidence in the Menendez’s case.
Hochman said he was filing an informal response to the habeas petition urging the court to reject it.
Newsom announced in November he would postpone a decision on whether to offer the brothers clemency until the new district attorney had reviewed the case.
In January, superior court judge Michael Jesic pushed the hearing out another two months – to 20 and 21 March – because of the Los Angeles wildfires.
Hochman, who took office in December, had not previously said whether he supported the proposed resentencing for the brothers, which will be taken up at the March hearing and would make them immediately eligible for parole.
In December, Bryan Freedman, an attorney who represents a group of 24 Menendez family members who support the brothers’ release, had publicly accusing Hochman’s office of a conflict of interest in the case, a criticism that a spokesperson for the office called “meritless”.
Since then, Hochman has met with more of the brothers’ relatives as he reviews their case, which includes thousands of pages of prison records to determine the “rehabilitation aspect” of their resentencing.
Most of their extended family supports the brothers’ release, and have said they deserve to be free after decades behind bars. Several relatives have said that in today’s world – which is more aware of the impact of sexual abuse – the brothers would not have been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life, as they were in 1996.
Lyle Menendez, who in 1989 was 21, and Erik Menendez, who was 18, admitted they fatally shot their parents, but they said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent disclosure of their father’s long-term molestation of Erik.
Prosecutors said at the time there was no evidence of molestation, and many details in their story of sexual abuse were not permitted in the trial that led to their conviction in 1996. Prosecutors accused the brothers of killing their parents for money.
In 2023, two important new pieces of evidence had surfaced in the case: a letter written by Erik before the killings that corroborated his allegations of abuse, and testimony by a former member of the boy band Menudo who said he was also abused by Jose Menendez, the brothers’ father. The brothers filed a habeas petition in response to the new evidence surfaced in 2023 challenging their convictions as unconstitutional.
Last year, a new documentary, and a controversial Netflix series by Ryan Murphy, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, criticized by some family members as “grotesque shockudrama”, put the spotlight on the brothers’ story and the evidence of the abuse they had suffered. A growing number of supporters have rallied behind the brothers, including Kim Kardashian, who has called publicly for their release, writing last year that the brothers, now in their 50s, were not the same people they had been when they were convicted.
“I have spent time with Lyle and Erik; they are not monsters,” Kardashian wrote. “They are kind, intelligent and honest men.”
Dani Anguiano and the Associated Press contributed reporting
Article by:Source: Lois Beckett in Los Angeles
