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Lyle and Erik Menendez will spend another holiday season behind bars, as their resentencing hearing was pushed back to January 2025.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Jesic rescheduled the brothers’ court hearing from December 11 to January 30 and January 31, 2025, NBC News reported on Monday, November 25. Jesic ruled that the hearing would be delayed so that he has enough time to review 17 boxes of evidence. Additionally, he wanted to give District Attorney-elect Nathan Hochman time to review the case.
Lyle, 56, and Erik, 53, were scheduled to appear virtually at the status conference on Monday, but technical difficulties prevented them from joining. Two of their aunts testified and asked for the brothers to be sent home. A lawyer later described their testimonies as “impassioned pleas,” according to NBC News.
Lyle and Erik are currently serving life sentences without parole for the 1989 murders of mom Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez and dad José Menendez. The conference came one month after Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón formally recommended that they be resentenced and given the possibility of parole.
“We are going to recommend to the court that the life without the possibility of parole be removed and that they will be sentenced for murder. Because there was two murders involved that would be 50 years to life,” Gascón said during a press conference on October 24. “However, because of their age, under the law because they were under 26 years of age at the time that these crimes occurred, they will be eligible for parole immediately.”
He continued, “When you look at the case of the Menendez brothers, you see two very young people, one was 19 and the other was 21 when they committed these horrible acts. And I want to underline, these were horrible acts. There is no excuse for murder.”
“I do believe that the brothers were subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the home, and molestation, and they went to prison for life without the possibility of parole, which meant that, certainly under the law at that time, they had no hopes of ever getting out,” Gascón added. “Even though they didn’t think that they would ever be let free, they engaged in a different journey: a journey of redemption and a journey of rehabilitation.”
Gascón concluded, “I believe that they have paid their debt to society, and the system provides a vehicle for their case to be reviewed by a parole board.”
The resentencing decision will ultimately be up to a judge. However, California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press release that Hochman, who is the incoming D.A. after beating Gascón in the election, will also need to make a recommendation for resentencing.
Hochman has not said if he will support Gascón’s recommendation, but he did vow to review all facts of the case.
“We will look at all the facts of the underlying crimes and what created those crimes,” Hochman told NBC News on November 19. “But as far as whether or not there’s a cultural shift or not, that’s in some ways irrelevant for whether or not the facts in the law in the Menendez case justify a resentencing and, if so, what that resentencing should be.”
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