Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman has not yet reached a decision on whether Lyle and Erik Menendez should be resentenced for their 1996 conviction of murdering their wealthy parents at their Beverly Hills home.
Driving the news: The proposed resentencing would make the brothers immediately eligible for parole and will be addressed at a March hearing, with Hochman planning to share an update on his position in the coming weeks.
- The previous district attorney, George Gascón, recommended last year that the brothers be resentenced to 50 years to life. Hochman criticized this recommendation as a “desperate political move” and won the election against Gascón in November.
- Lyle and Erik Menendez were found guilty in the 1989 murders of their entertainment executive father, Jose, and mother, Kitty Menendez, resulting in a life imprisonment sentence without parole. However, they have sought parole in recent years after new evidence of their father’s sexual abuse emerged.
- The brothers’ attorneys filed a habeas corpus petition in 2023 requesting a reexamination of the case, citing new evidence related to allegations of sexual abuse by their father. However, Hochman is filing an informal response to the petition, urging the court to reject it, and casting doubt on the relevance of the alleged sexual abuse to the case.
Go deeper: A resentencing hearing previously scheduled for early December was delayed to the end of January, and then to March 20 and 21 due to the Los Angeles wildfires. This additional time allows Hochman to review thousands of pages of prison records to assess the “rehabilitation aspect” of the brothers’ resentencing.
- The brothers initially admitted to killing their parents with a shotgun, claiming they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the disclosure of their father’s long-term molestation of Erik. Prosecutors argued that there was no evidence of molestation and accused the brothers of killing their parents for financial gain.
- The case gained renewed attention when Roy Rosselló, a former member of the Latin pop group Menudo, alleged that he was drugged and raped by Jose Menendez when he was a teenager in the 1980s. This new information is significant as Menendez was the head of RCA Records, under which Menudo was signed at the time.
