Erik and Lyle Menendez scored a major victory in their multipronged battle for their freedom on Friday, while the new Los Angeles district attorney was dealt a blow by a California judge who sided with the brothers in allowing their resentencing hearing to move forward.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Jesic handed down the decision, which amounts to a rejection of District Attorney Nathan Hochman’s request that a motion by his predecessor that the brothers’ sentence for the 1989 murder of their parents be reduced from life without the possibility of parole to 50 years be removed.
The brothers appeared in court via Zoom and made no comments about the decision on Friday.
The decision means that a resentencing hearing scheduled for the brothers for Thursday in Van Nuys will move forward. If the resentencing happens, Erik and Lyle Menendez, who by all accounts have been model prisoners for the past 35 years as they’ve served time in federal prison, would make them immediately eligible for parole, as they were under 29 years old when the murders took place.
“Everything you argued today is absolutely fair game for the resentencing hearing next Thursday,” Jesic told Hochman and the district attorney’s office attorney Habib Balian.
On Friday, Balian argued to the court that former D.A. George Gascón’s resentencing petition missed key elements of the original crime. In 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez gunned down their parents, Jose and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menéndez, in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion on Aug. 20, 1989. They were arrested months later, and the notion that this was a murder of self-defense by two sons who feared for their lives was rejected by half of two deadlocked juries in the separate trials and then barred from mention in a second joint retrial where they were found guilty.
Over the past few years, fresh evidence that helped turn millions toward rooting for their freedom has emerged in the form of a letter discovered in a late cousin’s desk, in which Erik Menendez described the daily abuse and that was written eight months prior to the killing of his parents; the former Menudo member who claims he suffered abuse at the hands of Jose Menendez.
Balian said the brothers killed their parents out of greed and cited the notes of a psychiatrist who wrote at the time that “this was not self-defense.” Mark Geragos, the celebrity attorney defending the Menendez brothers, scoffed off these suggestions; he has criticized Hochman for politicizing the case and echoed what most of the Menendez family has said about the new D.A.’s perception of the case.
Geragos said of the prosecution’s presentation before the court, “They have authorized the denial of sexual abuse.”