Erik Mendendez and his brother Lyle Menendez will not be getting out of jail this year.
A Los Angeles judge Monday pushed a resentencing hearing for the siblings to January 30. There is a follow-up hearing on the calendar for January 31 as briefings have been requested from prosecutors and the brothers’ lawyers. Replacing the previously set December 11 hearing, the logic behind Judge Michael Jesic’s reasoning today is that incoming Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman needs time to assess the high-profile matter once he officially takes office December 3.
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Jesic also may want to hear from the Parole Board on the brothers’ decades-long jailhouse conduct; the LASC judge will likely ask to hear recommendations the board may have on letting them out. The duo was sentenced to life without parole in 1996 after their second trial.
“Once I take office on December 3, I look forward to putting in the hard work to thoroughly review the facts and law of the Menendez case, including reviewing the confidential prison files, the transcripts of the two trials and the voluminous exhibits, as well as speaking with the prosecutors, defense attorneys and victim family members,” Hochman said last week, as anticipation about today’s hearing and the December hearing began to peak, and Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to hit pause on any clemency consideration.
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In a delayed hearing at the Van Nuys courthouse this morning, the brothers were set to appear virtually from the state prison where they are mutually housed near San Diego. However, technological glitches resulted in the siblings being heard but not seen.
With no cameras or electronics allowed in the courtroom, Menendez attorney Mark Geragos spoke with Jesic seeking his clients’ conviction be lessened from first-degree murder to voluntary manslaughter. If Geragos is successful in that current DA-backed endeavor next year, the brothers could be up for parole ASAP.
After the hearing, Geragos told the media: “We’re hoping that by the end of that, or sometime sooner, that we will, in fact, get the brothers’ release.” Of course, Geragos also hoped the press would be orderly in talking to senior Menendez family members who testified today, but that civility collapsed pretty quickly as the cameras chased family members on the courthouse steps.
The influence of a 2023 Peacock docuseries on the Menendez case, plus Ryan Murphy and Netflix’s hit Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, has been undeniable in getting this mater back in the headlines and in front of now-outgoing D.A. George Gascón. A media sensation at the time of their first trials in the early 1990s, the twentysomething Menendez brothers were ultimately convicted for the brutal 1989 shotgun murder of their parents.
Yet a less glamorous fact is that the reopening of the case truly started with a habeas petition filed by Geragos and fellow attorney Clifford Gardner last year. As was evident today, the lawyers sought to see the brothers’ convictions reexamined due to new and compelling evidence of the sexual abuse they allegedly suffered at the hands of their record-executive father Jose Menendez. Taking the lead of prosecutors, the judge during the brothers’ second trial essentially banned mention of sexual abuse by the elder Menendez. That’s not the case now.