An unorthodox fight for the post-trial release of Erik and Lyle Menendez from the California Prison, where they are condemned to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for firing their parents dead in April 1989, has changed its course all unexpected after the decision to seek the legal procedure to release the prisoners shifted to incoming Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman, who assumed the office last week.
Hochman gallops into the city’s most important cop job having trounced progressive incumbent and former district attorney George Gascón decisively in the November poll. Gascon, whom the voters removed from office on Nov. 5, after two tempestuous terms and several recall efforts, had advancing the process to release the brothers, who while confessing to matricide, have been exemplary prisoners for nearly a decade.
The fact that the decision of the brothers’ release after they performed the double murder in Beverly Hills more than thirty years ago is thrust upon him on the first day in the new post. The native of Beverly Hills has stated that he plans on taking a “hard middle approach to crime in the city, and that is how he will handle the Menendez case.
“From tomorrow onwards, I will be able to obtain thousands of pages of classified prison records and trial transcripts of two two-month trials,” he said, prior to an interview on the sidewalk of the Hall of Justice in Downtown Los Angeles. “I’ll get a chance now to sit down with the prosecutors, patrol officers, the defence lawyers [and] the victims’ families and then turn to what some of the motions now pending on the files are.”
The Hollywood Reporter on Monday carded an interview request to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office but none was answered.
As they sit patiently hoping for their lottery of freedom in the near future as provided by the American Constitution, the legal factual remedies open to the Menendez brothers by 2005 are three fold. Before the release of Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story this fall and the brothers’ only chance for freedom rested in a petition for a habeas corpus hearing to overturn their convictions.
This maneuver is typically used after all appeals are exhausted, but factors, including new evidence revealed in the Peacock docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Girl Friends and Boys Betrayed — especially this one claiming that while he was an RCA Records executive in the 1980s his father had raped former Menudo member Roy Rossello — deserve attention. The outcome of the hearing tomorrow could see Erik and Lyle set free or if the charges are reduced against them.
This was the plan the brothers and their attorneys came up with while in the Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego where the two have been detained concurrently since 2005, and in late October Gascón, in the middle of his reelection campaign wrote a letter to the presiding judge over the case arguing that the two should be released.
To this list, time was also running Ryan Murphy’s limited series and a follow-up documentary series that Netflix produced to remind the nation of their story. At the time, the brothers’ lawyer Mark Geragos steered their case to a clemency release after initially attempting to have the charges downgraded to manslaughter which Gascon dismissed as unsuitable to the circumstances of the killings. Pardon from the governor, as an agenda, would, of course, be more desirable for the brothers than the longer habeas corpus hearing option they were trying.
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