Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón has moved up his timeline on making a decision about the fate of the Menendez brothers.
Gascón previously announced in October that his office was reviewing the 2023 habeas corpus petition filed by Erik and Lyle Menendez, which contains new evidence and asks for a resentencing of the brothers who are currently serving life in prison without parole for the 1989 murders of their parents, José and Kitty Menendez. He had previously set a hearing date for Nov. 29.
But speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Gascón, who is currently up for reelection, said he’ll make a decision on the brothers’ resentencing by the end of this week, citing the growing public push to release the brothers as his reasoning.
“I plan to have a decision by the end of this week,” he told Jake Tapper, “which is what I promised when we started getting a lot of inquiries. We had been looking at this case for over a year, by the way. We had a court time late November on the habeas, but given the public attention to this case, I’ve tried to come up with a decision earlier than that and I will.”
That announcement followed the recently renewed interest in the decades-old case, thanks in large part to the TikTok movement of support around Erik and Lyle and the hit Netflix drama series from Ryan Murphy, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, as well as the subsequent Netflix documentary that interviewed the brothers 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 late September release.
The habeas attention could be the Menendez brothers’ last opportunity, as they’re out of appeals. Gascón said his office is split 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, that are adamant that they should spend the rest of their life in prison and that they were not molested. I have other people in my office that believe, actually, that they probably were molested and that they deserve to have some relief.”
The newly uncovered evidence that led to the habeas petition includes a recovered letter written by a 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 trials, that corroborates the brothers’ self-defense claims of ongoing abuse from their father; as well as an abuse claim against José from new witness Roy Rosselló, a member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo that was managed by José and his RCA Records. Rosselló came forward with the allegation in the April 2023 Peacock docuseries, Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed. Gascón has previously shared an image of the handwritten letter on his social media, but has since removed the post.
“This is a trial that occurred twice. Originally, the jury couldn’t come to a decision, so it hung,” Gascón explained to Tapper. “Then in the second trial, there was a lot of evidence that was presented in the first trial that was not presented in the second trial, and they were found guilty. There’s no question that they murdered their parents.”
So Gascón said what’s under review is the evidence that was never presented that could have changed the outcome, as well as considering, under California law, if the brothers are rehabilitated prisoners who are safe to reenter the community.
“Either one of those vehicles has to be evaluated by a court and approved by a court, and I’m looking at both,” he said, adding that he thinks “implicit bias” around male rape also played a role at the time of the trials and “may have had an impact in the way the case was presented to the jury.”
Last week, Erik and Lyle’s extended family held a press conference calling for Gascón’s help to reexamine the case. The brothers’ attorney, Mark Geragos, pointed to Murphy’s nine-part series for rallying the public behind the brothers. “When the Ryan Murphy series came out, it was such a caricature of them that the pendulum swing — the backlash — created a focus on it,” he said.
English (US) ·