Menendez's fate will be decided Thursday by the Los Angeles district attorney

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón anticipated his decision on 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 calls for resentencing of the brothers who are currently serving life in prison without parole for the murder of their parents in 1989. , José and Kitty Menendez. He had previously set a hearing date for November 29.

But speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Gascón, who is currently running for re-election, said he will make a decision on the brothers' new sentencing by the end of this week, citing growing public pressure to release the brothers as his motivation.

A press conference has been set for Thursday afternoon at 1:30 pm in downtown Los Angeles.

“I plan to make a decision by the end of this week,” he told Jake Tapper, “which is what I promised when we started getting a lot of requests. By the way, we had been looking into this case for more than a year. At the end of November we had a habeas court trial, but given the public attention on this case, I have tried to come to a decision sooner and will.

That announcement followed recent renewed interest in the decades-old case, thanks in large part to the TikTok support movement around Erik and Lyle and Ryan Murphy's hit Netflix drama series, Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez, as well as the subsequent Netflix documentary that interviewed the brothers together for the first time in decades following their conviction for first-degree murder in 1996. 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 chance, out of appeal. Gascón said his office is divided on the outcome. “There are actually two different camps in my office,” he told Tapper. “I have a group of people, including some involved in the original trial, who are adamant that they should spend the rest of their lives in prison and who have not been molested. There are other people in my office who believe, in fact, that they have probably been harassed and that they deserve some relief.”

Newly discovered evidence that led to the habeas petition includes a recovered letter written by then-17-year-old Erik to his cousin Andres “Andy Cano” in 1988, eight months before the murders and never mentioned in the mid-1990s. trials, which corroborate the brothers' self-defense claims of continued abuse by their father; as well as a complaint of abuse against José by new witness Roy Rosselló, a member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo managed by José and his RCA Records. Rosselló came forward with the accusation in the April 2023 Peacock docuseries, Menendez + Menudo: Betrayed boys. Gascón previously shared an image of the handwritten letter on his social media, but has since removed the post.

“This is a process that happened twice. At first the jury couldn't make a decision, so they suspended,” Gascón explained to Tapper. “Then in the second trial, there was a lot of evidence presented in the first trial that wasn't presented in the second trial, and they were found guilty. There is no doubt that they killed their parents.”

So Gascón said what is under review is evidence that was never presented that could have changed the outcome, as well as considering, under California law, whether the brothers are rehabilitated prisoners and can safely reenter the community.

“One of these means 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 biases” about male rape also played a role at the time of the killing. trials and “may have had an impact on how the case was presented to the jury.”

Last week, Erik and Lyle's extended family held a press conference asking for Gascón's help in reviewing 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 that the pendulum swing — the backlash — created a focus on it,” he said.

This story was originally published Oct. 23 at 7:52 am

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