A judge is expected to rule Friday on the effort to remove Los Angeles County’s top prosecutor from Erik and Lyle Menendez’s bid to reduce their prison sentences after their defense team accused the district attorney of bias.
Los Angeles County Superior County Judge Michael Jesic is also expected to rule whether a “risk assessment” can be admitted as evidence at their resentencing hearing.
Prison and parole officials conducted the assessment, which examines the risk the brothers may pose to the public if they are released from prison, as part of a separate request for clemency that Erik, 54, and Lyle, 57, made to California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The brothers are serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole for the 1989 shotgun murders of their parents, José and Kitty Menendez. They’ve claimed the killings were in self-defense after Lyle Menendez confronted their father about sexually abusing his younger brother.
Prosecutors have described the killings as cold-blooded and financially motivated.
The brothers’ first trial ended with a hung jury in 1994. They were convicted of first-degree murder after a second trial two years later.
Their resentencing effort — which could make them eligible for parole immediately if it is granted — was supported by former Los Angeles County District rge Gascón, who said they’ve been exceptional prisoners during the more than three decades they’ve spent behind bars.
Many of the brothers’ relatives — and some celebrities — have championed their cause and cited their accomplishments behind bars, including their assistance to inmates with disabilities, college courses they’ve completed and a green space “beautification” project they undertook at the Southern California prison where they’re incarcerated.
Gascón’s replacement, Nathan Hochman, has opposed the resentencing, saying there are 16 “unacknowledged lies” about the killings that the brothers haven’t accounted for. Among them, he has said, was their account that they killed their parents in self-defense.
Jesic will ultimately determine whether they should be resentenced.
Hochman moved to withdraw his predecessor’s request, but the effort failed, and the opposing sides were supposed to air their differences during a two-day hearing last month. Hours into the proceedings, Jesic postponed the resentencing bid and said he would instead consider the risk assessments — which haven’t been made public — and the defense’s argument that Hochman’s office should be thrown off the case.
In a filing, the defense pointed to a lawyer who previously represented a Menendez relative who opposed the brothers’ resentencing and was later hired by Hochman to run his office’s victim’s services unit. The lawyer doesn’t appear to have been properly walled from the case and hasn’t treated other relatives fairly, according to the filing.
“No one from the District Attorney’s victims services department has contacted even a single of the family members whose views conflicted with the views” of that lawyer’s former client, the filing says.
The filling also cites “gruesome” crime scene photographs that were shown at a hearing last month without warning while Menendez family members were in the courtroom.
Hochman apologized for the photos but called the effort to remove his office from the case a “drastic and desperate step” that misses what he has described as one of the central issues in the brothers’ resentencing — assessing whether they have taken full responsibility for their crimes.
