The Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said in a press conference Monday morning that he would ask the court to withdraw the resentencing notion in the case against the Menendez brothers.
The brothers, Lyle and Erik, have been in prison since 1996 serving a life sentence without parole for the killings of their parents, José and Kitty Menendez. The original call for resentencing was filed in their case by former District Attorney George Gascón in October, according to USA Today.
In his request to withdraw the resentencing motion, Hochman said “The Menendez brothers have never come clean and admitted that they lied about their self-defense.” The self-defense claims from the brothers came on the basis that they were subject to sexual abuse by their father, and believed their parents were going to kill them, according to ABC News.
Hochman said his office would consider supporting resentencing if the Menendez brothers “unequivocally [and] sincerely fully accept complete responsibility.”
The Menedez brothers’ case regained national attention last fall, 28 years after their sentencing, due to the success of “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” the anthology series on Netflix created by Ryan Murphy. The series received 19.5 million views in its first week of streaming, according to Variety, and sparked opinions about the brothers’ sentencing.
“I’m a little disappointed. A lot of people were hoping that there would be a resentencing because they weren’t given justice which I agree with,” said Delara Jadvar, sophomore health and human sciences major and viewer of the “Monsters” series.
After watching the series, Jadvar said “It was all the abuse and the fact that there were new findings and evidence that wasn’t considered the first time,” that prompted her support for the brothers’ resentencing.
Siddhi Shinde, freshman communication and game art student, said she feels similarly.
“I think that they’ve been in [prison] long enough. With the new evidence that has come to light, I think it’s proven that it was self-defense and they should be released,” she said.
This “new evidence” is being used in the Menendez brothers’ pursuit of two other paths to release, aside from resentencing. They filed a habeas corpus petition in 2023, published by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, calling for the review of two new pieces of attestation — a letter Erik Menendez wrote to his cousin Andy Cano regarding the alleged abuse from his father, and a former boy band member’s allegations of abuse against José Menendez.
Hochman said last month that he asked the court to deny the brothers’ habeas corpus petition, according to ABC News.
Hochman’s anti-release platform towards the Menendez brothers has been largely rooted in his belief that the brothers have “lied about their self-defense as well as suborned perjury and attempted to suborn perjury by their friends for their lies,” he said in his press conference on Monday.
Following Hochman’s press conference, an administrator for Lyle Menendez’s Facebook page posted that “of all those ‘lies’ [Hochman] talked about, several of them were admitted/stipulated to in the first trial. Several of them were utterly debunked… And several other ‘lies’ were absolutely disproven or reasonably disputed.”
Despite Hochman’s call for the withdrawal of the motion for the Menendez brothers’ resentencing and his position “that they shouldn’t get out of jail,” his office is “prepared to go forward” with the hearings for resentencing, if necessary. The hearings are slated for March 20 and 21.