Menendez’s fate will be decided by the end of this week, LA district attorney says

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón has moved up his timeline to decide the fate of the Menendez brothers.

Gascón announced earlier in October that his office was reviewing the 2023 habeas corpus petition filed by Erik and Lyle Menendez. This petition contains new evidence and calls for a new conviction of the brothers who are currently serving a life sentence without parole for the 1989 murders of their parents, José and Kitty Menendez. He previously set a hearing date for Nov. 29.

But speaking to CNN, Gascón, who is currently up for re-election, said he will make a decision on whether to resentencing the brothers by the end of this week, citing growing public pressure to release the brothers as his reasoning.

“I plan to make a decision by the end of this week,” he told Jake Tapper, “which I promised when we started getting a lot of questions. In fact, we had been looking at this case for over a year. We had a habeas trial in late November, but given the public attention to this case, I tried to come up with a decision sooner and I will do so.

That announcement followed recently renewed interest in the decades-old case, thanks in large part to the TikTok support movement surrounding Erik and Lyle and Ryan Murphy’s hit Netflix drama series, Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez, as well as the subsequent Netflix documentary in which the brothers were interviewed together for the first time in decades following their 1996 first-degree murder conviction. Monsters quickly topped Netflix’s global TV charts and has amassed millions of viewers since its release in late September.

The habeas hearing could be the Menendez brothers’ last chance, as there is no further appeal. Gascón said his office is divided on the outcome. “There are actually two different camps in my office,” he explained. “I have a group of people, including some who were involved in the original trial, who are adamant that they should spend the rest of their lives in prison and that they were not abused. I have other people in my office who believe they have probably been abused and that they deserve some relief.

The newly discovered evidence that led to the habeas petition includes a recovered letter written by then 17-year-old Erik to his cousin Andres “Andy Cano” in 1988, eight months before the murders and never brought up in the mid-1990s . lawsuits confirming the brothers’ self-defense claims of continued abuse by their father; as well as an abuse claim against José from new witness Roy Rosselló, a member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo which was managed by José and his RCA Records. Rosselló came forward with the accusation in the April 2023 Peacock docuseries, Menendez + Menudo: Boys betrayed. Gascón previously shared an image of the handwritten letter on his social media, but has since deleted the message.

“This is a process that has happened twice. Originally, the jury couldn’t reach a decision, so it was left hanging,” Gascón explained to Tapper. “Then in the second trial there was a lot of evidence that was presented in the first trial that wasn’t presented in the second trial, and they were found guilty. There is no doubt that they killed their parents.”

So Gascón said what is now being reviewed is evidence that was never presented that could have changed the outcome, and that, under California law, consideration is being given to whether the brothers are rehabilitated inmates who can safely reenter the community.

“Each of these vehicles has to be reviewed by a court and approved by a court, and I look at both,” he said, adding that he thinks “implicit bias” around male rape was also at play at the time of the killing . the trials and “may have had an impact on the way the case was presented to the jury.”

Last week, Erik and Lyle’s extended family held a press conference asking for Gascón’s help to reinvestigate the case. The brothers’ attorney, Mark Geragos, pointed to Murphy’s nine-part series to rally the public behind the brothers. “When the Ryan Murphy series came out, it was such a caricature of it that the pendulum swing – the recoil – created a focus on it,” he said.