NASHVILLE, Tennessee — In 1989, Americans were captivated by the Shotgun murders of José and Kitty Menéndez in his Beverly Hills mansion by his own children. Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison and lost all subsequent appeals. But today, more than three decades later, they unexpectedly have a chance to come out.

Not because of the functioning of the legal system. For entertainment.

After two recent documentaries and a scripted drama about the couple brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, Los Angeles The district attorney has recommended They will be resentful.

The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment like the Netflix docudrama “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menéndez” He is making real changes in the lives of his subjects and in society at large. At their best, true crime podcasts, streaming series, and social media content can help expose injustices and right wrongs.

But because many of these products prioritize entertainment and profit, they can also have serious negative consequences.

You can help the Menéndez brothers

The use of true crime stories to sell a product has a long history in the United States, from the tabloid newspapers of the mid-19th century to television movies such as “The Burning Bed” in 1984. Today it is podcasts, series from Netflix and even true crime TikToks. Some may consider the fascination with the genre morbid, but it can be explained in part by the human desire to make sense of the world through stories.

In the case of the Menéndez brothers, Lylewho was 21 at the time, and Erik, who was 18 at the time, said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the father’s long-term sexual abuse of Erik from being revealed. But at trial, many of the sexual abuse allegations could not be presented to the jury, and prosecutors maintained that they committed murder simply to keep their parents’ money.

For years, that is the story that many people who watched the saga from a distance accepted and talked about.

The new dramas delve into the brothers’ childhoods, helping audiences better understand the context of the crime and thus see the world as a less scary place, says Adam Banner, a criminal defense attorney who writes a column on pop culture and crime. law for the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal.

“Not only does that make us feel better intrinsically,” Banner says, “but objectively it also gives us the ability to think, ‘Well, now I can take this case and put it in a different bucket than another situation where I have nothing.’ “. explanation and all I can say is, ‘This kid must be evil.'”

The rise of the antihero is at stake

Much of the true crime of the past takes particularly shocking crimes and explores them in depth, usually with the assumption that those convicted of the crime were actually guilty and deserved to be punished.

The success of the podcast Serial”, which calls into question the Adnan Syed murder convictionhas given rise to a newer genre that often assumes (and purports to prove) the opposite. The protagonists are innocent or, as in the case of the Menéndez brothers, guilty but sympathetic and, therefore, do not deserve their harsh sentences.

“There’s a long tradition of journalists breaking down criminal cases and showing people as potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project and author of “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.” .”

“But I think the curve increases exponentially in the wake of ‘Serial,’ which was in 2014 and obviously changed the entire economic and cultural landscape of podcasts,” Chammah says. “And then a few years later, ‘Making a Murderer’ came out and became kind of a giant example of that in the docuseries.”

During roughly the same period, the innocence movement gained steam alongside the Black Lives Matter movement and increased attention to deaths in police custody. And in popular culture, both fiction and nonfiction, the trend is to explore the backstory of a villainous character.

“All these superheroes, supervillains, the movie ‘Joker’… you are inundated with the idea that people’s bad behavior is determined by trauma when they were younger,” Chammah said.

Banner often represents some of the least sympathetic defendants imaginable, including those accused of child sexual abuse. He says the effects of these cultural trends are real. Today jurors are more likely to give their clients the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he’s also concerned about the intense attention that today’s true crimes pay to cases where things went wrong, which he says are outliers.

While the puzzle aspect of “Did they get it right?” It might fuel our curiosity, he says, we risk sowing distrust throughout the criminal justice system.

“You don’t want to eliminate the positive ramifications that paying attention to a case can bring. But you also don’t want to give the impression that this is how our justice system works. “That if we can get enough cameras and microphones on a case, then that’s how we’re going to save someone from death row or that’s how we’re going to get a life sentence overturned.”

Chammah adds: “If sentencing decisions, second looks, and criminal justice policies are opened up to pop culture (in the sense of who gets a podcast about them, who gets Kim Kardashian talking about them), the risk of extreme arbitrariness is really great. … It seems like it’s only a matter of time before some defendant’s wealthy family basically funds a podcast trying to make a viral case for his innocence.”

Audience is also a factor

Whitney Phillips, who teaches a class on true crime and media ethics at the University of Oregon, says the popularity of the genre on social media adds another layer of complications, often encouraging active participation from viewers and listeners.

“Because these are not trained detectives or people who have real experience in the area of ​​forensic science or even criminal law, there is a very common result of the wrong people being implicated or presented as suspects,” he says. ”In addition, the families of the victims are now part of the discourse. They could be accused of this, that or the other, or at the very least, the murder of their loved one, their violent death, being entertainment for millions of strangers.”

This sensitivity has been chronicled and satirized in the streaming comedy-drama series. “Only murders in the building” which follows three unlikely collaborators who live in a New York apartment building where a murder has taken place. The trio decide to make a true crime podcast while also trying to solve the case.

Nothing about true crime is fundamentally unethical, Phillips says. “It’s just that the social media system – the attention economy – is not calibrated for ethics. “It’s calibrated for views, it’s calibrated for engagement, and it’s calibrated for sensationalism.”

Many influencers now compete for “killer audiences,” Phillips says, and social media and more traditional media feed off each other. True crime is now infiltrating lifestyle content and even makeup tutorials.

“It was kind of inevitable that you would see these two things collide and that these influencers would literally put on makeup and then say something very… it’s very casual, very suspicious, often not particularly well-researched.” “, says. “This is not investigative journalism.”