UPDATE (Oct, 24, 2024, 5:30 p.m.): L.A. District Attorney George Gascón said in a press conference on Thursday that he will ask a court to resentence Erik and Lyle Menendez and make them eligible for parole “immediately.”
Like millions of Americans, I’ve been riveted by “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” the hit Netflix series about the two Beverly Hills brothers who murdered their parents in 1989. Some of showrunner Ryan Murphy’s work is too campy for my tastes, but this time around he nailed it, helped by a superb cast anchored by Javier Bardem (Jose Menendez, an entertainment executive) and Chloë Sevigny (his aimless wife, Kitty).
The series also appears to have a fan in George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney. Earlier this month, the 70-year-old prosecutor announced he was reviewing the Menendez convictions, which saw them sentenced to life in prison in 1996. “Given the totality of the circumstances, I don’t think they deserve to be in prison until they die,” he has said.
The Menendez brothers have developed quite a fan base online in recent years, and Gascón is clearly playing to a social media audience.
The brothers could be set free, or face a lighter sentence. I am not sure if that’s the right call — but I do have the queasy feeling that Gascón is only using the Menendez case as a last-ditch effort to escape defeat on Election Day.
To his credit, Gascón has overseen 14 exonerations of unjustly convicted people. Only I don’t think that’s happening here. Instead, a politician in trouble is exploiting a tragedy. And make no mistake, Gascón is in big trouble, trailing law-and-order candidate Nathan Hochman by 30%, according to a recent poll conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times (with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points).
Hochman has said that the “timing is incredibly suspicious.” Yes, he also has a political stake here, just like Gascón. Which is what makes this whole matter so unseemly: The district attorney has turned the troubled brothers into a political prop.
An opportunity to change the narrative
Enter the Menendez case.
Last year, the brothers’ attorneys submitted a writ of habeas corpus in which they claimed the murder was an act of “imperfect self-defense, after a lifetime of physical and sexual abuse from their parents.” They also submitted new evidence, including a letter Erik, then 13, wrote to a cousin: “Every night I stay up thinking he might come in.” The petition additionally includes an allegation from Roy Rosselló, a former member of the boy band Menudo, that “he was anally raped twice, and orally copulated, by Jose Menendez.”
Gascón announced his renewed interest in the Menendez case on Oct. 3. As Kathy Cady, an attorney for Kitty Menendez’s brother, notes, that same day, the Los Angeles Times ran a new story about Shanice Amanda Dyer, a member of the Crips who had killed two people, seemingly at random, when she was 17. Gascón tried her as a juvenile, in keeping with his progressive philosophy. A short stint in prison, and Dyer was out, soon to be arrested for a suspected Pomona killing.
Gascón’s office told me that he “has a legal right to request that the court re-sentence the brothers to a lesser sentence if they have been rehabilitated.” But for Cady, who says her client has been kept in the dark by the prosecutor’s office, this is yet another example of Gascón’s “callous disregard” for the victims of crime.
The Menendez brothers have developed quite a fan base online in recent years, and Gascón is clearly playing to a social media audience, as if his constituency were entirely in cyberspace. In one cringeworthy TikTok clip, he hypes himself up to a Sabrina Carpenter soundtrack. Some of the comments are rather revealing. “I’ve never been more invested in California politics until now,” wrote a user who said she was from Mississippi. There are a lot of heart emojis and the like, with little questioning of his motives. At least online, Gascón has gotten the reaction that he sought. The real world is another matter.
From LA to cop to LA’s top cop
Gascón used to be a cop in Los Angeles, later became the chief of police in Mesa, Arizona, and eventually became San Francisco’s district attorney (a post vacated by now-Vice President Kamala Harris, who had been elected California’s attorney general at the time). Then, in 2019, Gascón announced he was moving to Los Angeles, where he would run for district attorney on a progressive platform.
I have the queasy feeling that Gascón is only using the Menendez case as a last-ditch effort to escape defeat on Election Day. My own view is that criminal justice reform is inherently at odds with the prosecutor’s role — it’s like asking the bartender to preach sobriety. Progressive prosecutors set themselves up for failure by radically shifting the priorities of an office most people expect to charge alleged criminals with crimes. And they often neglect to explain their policies in ways that are free of jargon. Gascón never allayed the anxieties of his critics, instead supplying them with ever more evidence, like charging some suspects of serious crimes with misdemeanors or recommending mental health treatment instead of prison for assailants with histories of violence. OK, you’re thinking, it’s entirely possible that Gascón is a deeply flawed prosecutor and politician. Even so, he could still be right about the Menendez case. Having him win a second term might just be the price we have to pay for the brothers to finally get the fair hearing they have long deserved. (Although, there’s no indication at this point that the Menendez case has boosted Gascón’s poll numbers.) Except there is no reason to believe this was a miscarriage of justice. There is no dispute about who killed Kitty and Jose Menendez as they watched TV on a summer Sunday night. The cops didn’t swab the brothers for gunpowder residue, as they should have, but there was no incompetence of the kind that would mark the imminent trial of O.J. Simpson. Alan Abrahamson covered the first Menendez trial (which allowed for an airing of abuse allegations and ended in a hung jury; they were convinced at a second trial, the scope of which was more limited) for the Los Angeles Times and came to the conclusion that “the brothers are skilled liars who prey on the emotions of those who do not understand the presence of evil in our world,” as he wrote recently in The Free Press. Yes, we see the case differently than we did 30 years ago, when our ears were not as attuned to the abuse of boys and men. But the brothers were not convicted of being entitled rich kids, which was the prevailing perception of them at the time. They went to prison for killing their parents. With shotguns. In cold blood. That was true then, and it is true now. During their two trials, the Menendez brothers told their story with practiced eloquence and seemingly genuine emotion. They were represented by some of the most talented defense counsel available in Los Angeles. The jury heard the defendants out and found them guilty. The case was closed. By cynically reopening it, Gascón is impugning the work of the very same criminal justice system he supposedly represents. Angelenos deserve better.
Alexander Nazaryan
Alexander Nazaryan writes about politics, culture and science. 
