No release for the Menendez brothers, despite the Netflix series

A first hearing refused the conditional release of Erik Menendez on Thursday. And it should be the same for Lyle.

After the Menendez brothers’ affair returned under the spotlight last year with the release of the successful Netflix series Monsters, by Ryan Murphy, the parole of the two assassins convicted of the murder of their parents, was refused this week.

During an audience this Thursday, a parole of Erik Menendez was rejected, believing that the boy – aged 54 today – still had work to do to rehabilitate before being able to leave his cell.

The panel of two members acknowledged that Menendez had carried out good detention, but also expressed his concerns in the face of a long list of rules of the rules. He will be able to ask for his release in three years.

“This ability to show a facade while being something else worries us,” said Commissioner Robert Barton during this session which took place in a distant manner (via Teams). Journalist James Queally of Los Angeles Times followed the audience and relayed information to the media (via Variety). “We can mature in certain aspects, but have gray areas in others.”

Erik Menendez was presented for the first time at parole since the murder of his parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, whom he committed with his brother in Beverly Hills in 1989. The hearing of Lyle Menendez, 57, is to take place this Friday and she should lead to the same result.

Menendez brothers’ family members spent years claiming their release. A family spokesman said Wednesday was “prudently optimistic” on Wednesday that the panel would see that the brothers had changed. After the announcement of the decision, the same spokesperson described the verdict as “disappointing”.

“We will continue to support him and hope that he will soon go home.”

During the hearing, Erik Menendez apologized for the murder of her parents, stressing that this crime inflicted lasting trauma on his family.

“I just want my family to understand how unimaginably I am sorry for what I have made them suffer from August 20, 1989 until today. It should concern them above all. If it is one day given to me, I want the healing to be for them.”

But the prosecutor Habib Balian argued that Erik Menendez said what he thought that the panel wanted to hear, while pursuing a “false narrative of self -defense” concerning the murders. The judges also reviewed the details of the crime, questioning on his state of mind and the reasons why he and his brother had killed their parents rather than flee. Menendez spoke of a history of sexual abuse, without being able to go into details.

“It is difficult to make understand how terrifying my father was. When I think back to the person I was then, and what I believed in the world and my parents, fleeing was inconceivable. Flee meant death.”

Barton asked him if he thought that part of his actions was self -defense. Menendez replied “no”, despite his lawyer’s objection. Later, he said that he feared that his father was trying to rape him that night. Regarding the murder of his mother, Menendez explained that once he understood that she knew for the abuses, he perceived him as united to his father: “That night, I saw them as one person,” he said.

Barton interrupted lead while he was starting to talk about sexual abuse: “The objective of this hearing is not to get the case, or put your parents in trial”.

At the end of the hearing, Barton indicated that the decision was based mainly on Menendez’s behavior in prison, while stressing that the murder of Kitty showed that he was then “devoid of human compassion”, the latter having apparently been the victim of domestic violence.

“You were not in immediate danger of death at the time of the murders. The only true thing you said about responsibility is that there is no justification for your actions. What you did, when you did and how you did it, there is no justification.”

Let us recall that in May last May, faced with the impact of the Netflix series, a judge had changed the sentence of the brothers at 50 years in prison, giving them the possibility of requesting a parole (hitherto impossible), following a request from the former Los Angeles prosecutor, George Gascón, eight months earlier, in full dissemination of monsters.