Almost a month ago, in mid -April, the judge gave green light for the Menéndez brothers, who killed their parents 35 years ago, continued to seek their freedom. Now, after seven months of legal views, Judge Michael Jesus has firmly considered the request that Lyle, 57, and Erik, 54, have made him about a new conviction and has definitely decided to give the brothers the opportunity to have a new sentence. In fact, he has already given it: he imposes a 50 -year prison sentence, instead of life imprisonment, as until now. That gives them the possibility to go outside thanks to a request for probation and after turning 35 years in prison.
The judge’s passage comes in frontal opposition to the prosecutor’s recommendations. On March 10, the new Attorney General of Los Angeles, Nathan Hochman, who was elected in the elections on November 5, rejected that there was a new sentence (just unlike his predecessor, George Gascón, who was the one who launched the entire case last year). For Hochman, the brothers did not deserve to be free because they had been lying about twenty fundamental issues related to the case for three decades. “They never admitted that they gave false identifications to try to buy weapons in San Diego. They tried to justify that they were out of the house all day of the murder, when it was not so (…) again, lies,” Hochman put as examples in a massive press conference.
A month later, the case passed to Judge Michael Jesus. He arrived with all the weight of the rejection by the Prosecutor’s Office to a new sentence. However, Jesus put himself in his favor, and a month ago he gave the green light to the fact that the lawyer of the Menéndez, the media Mark Geragos, requested a new sentence on Thursday and Friday, April 17 and 18. “Today is perhaps the most important day for them since they were imprisoned,” Geragos said last week. “They have waited for a lot of time for justice.”
Now the media brothers may opt for probation because they committed the murder before being 26 years old, which by the laws of California allow that possibility. This possibility must be approved by a specific board in which the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is present, and therefore, in a political turn, it may always not approve it.
The case dates back to August 20, 1989. That night, Lyle and Erik Menéndez, then 21 and 18 years old, killed their parents with about thirty bullets in the living room of their house of the accommodated Beverly Hills, in California, while they watched the TV and ate ice cream. Initially they tried to pass the crime as a murder committed by the mafia, but finally it was shown that they had bought weapons and ammunition illegally and had murdered José and Kitty Menéndez, musical executive and housewife. In their first judgment, in 1993, they argued that their father had sexually abusing years and that they acted in self -defense. Without reaching a conclusion, the trial declared himself void and repeated in 1996, when they were declared guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of probation.
The brothers spent 22 years in different prisons until they found themselves in the correctional Richard J. Donovan de San Diego, where since 2018 they serve together. Justice decided to grant them the possibility of being together after their efforts for reintegration. Both have obtained university titles in jail and, while Lyle is more focused on sport and performs functions of intermediary and leader between inmates and prison staff, Erik has dedicated himself more to mediation and has more focused skills in art. His case has revealed again by different documentaries and podcast, but especially for a Netflix series created by Ryan Murphy where he is exposed, although with fiction licenses, his story. Last Friday, Cooper Koch, the actor who embodied Erik in fiction, went to view in court.
In addition to the resentment, there would be two other possible paths for the Menéndez brothers to be released. One would be through a request for habeas corpus, where a prisoner asks to evaluate a sentence before the discovery of new evidence. In this case, there would be on the table the question that José Menéndez abused his children, but not only his: also of a member of the band often, who declared against him in a documentary, something that would support Lyle’s testimony and Erik and that he could open a new trial. Of course, prosecutor Nathan Hochman also opposes this option, so it doesn’t seem like a probable way.
The other scenario would be that the highest authority of California, its governor, Gavin Newsom, decided to examine the case and forgive them. The possibility is not so far. At the beginning of January, Newsom spoke about introducing changes in the probation system: “Justice can be blind, but we should not be dark when determining if someone is rehabilitated and prepared to get out of prison,” he wrote in a statement issued shortly before the prosecutor Hochman gave a negative vote about the ressentation. “This new process will help to guarantee even more than the victims and district prosecutors are part of the switching process and will improve public safety by anticipating risk assessment, as we are doing in the Menéndez case.” Another path, extreme but possible, would be for Newsom himself to block that probation.
Hochman, more conservative, and Newsom, one of the referents of the Democrats throughout the country, are political opposites. That the governor decided to forgive the Menéndez would be a blow against the Prosecutor’s Office for his part and give a complicated image of him. There are two views for clemency, one for each brother, scheduled for June 13. We will have to wait to see if they finally arrive at that date or if, thanks to the resentment, they achieve freedom before.
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