LA County District Attorney Gascón supports pardon request for Menendez brothers

LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles County District Attorney said Wednesday that he is asking California’s governor to grant pardons to brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, who are serving life sentences for killing their parents in 1989.

Less than a week later, District Attorney George Gascón announced he supported the pair’s clemency requests He advised them to get angry. in their murder case.

“I strongly support pardoning Erik and Lyle Menendez, who are currently serving life sentences without the possibility of parole,” Gascón said. he said in a statement. “They served for 34 years respectively and continued their education, working to create new programs to support the rehabilitation of their fellow inmates.”

The brothers’ attorneys submitted their request for clemency to Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday.

The clemency would allow for the immediate release of the brothers, whose first televised trial caused a sensation in national media, and is separate from efforts that have sparked outrage.

A spokesman for Newsom’s office declined to comment on whether Newsom is a Democrat., tends to grant forgiveness.

“Pending pardon applications are confidential and we cannot discuss individual cases,” the spokesperson said in an email. There is no set timeline for a clemency review.

The brothers killed their parents, entertainment company executive José Menendez, and Kitty Menendez with a shotgun at their home in Beverly Hills in 1989.

The brothers’ defense lawyers argued that their father sexually abused them. After two trials, they were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. In the second trial, most of the sexual abuse allegations were deemed inadmissible in court.

Gascón, a progressive district attorney who was elected in 2020 and is running for re-election this year, introduced a motion last Thursday calling for the brothers to be sentenced to 50 years to life in prison.

If admitted, the brothers would be eligible for immediate parole because they were under 26 at the time of the crimes, Gascón said. Lyle Menendez was 21 and Erik Menendez was 18 at the time of the murders.

A Supreme Court judge will decide whether they should be resentenced. A hearing is scheduled for December 11 as part of the escalation efforts.

In their request for amnesty, the brothers’ lawyers argued that both of them were subjected to sexual abuse by their father from a young age. His lawyers wrote that Lyle Menendez was abused by his father until he was 8 years old, and Erik Menendez was sexually abused from the age of 6 until the murders.

Both worked to rehabilitate themselves and earned degrees and created programs to help other inmates, their lawyers wrote in the letters. Those factors and their ages (Lyle Menendez is 56 and Erik Menendez is 53) make each “an exemplary candidate for mercy,” the attorneys wrote.

The brothers shot their parents multiple times with Mossberg shotguns while they were watching television on the couch on August 20, 1989.

They were first tried in 1993 and the jury was deadlocked, leading to mistrials. They were later retried and found guilty of first-degree murder in 1996.

Prosecutors at the time argued that the brothers were motivated by greed, killed their parents to inherit a fortune, and went on a spending spree after the murders.

CORRECTION (October 30, 2024, 10:05 PM ET): An earlier version of this article misstated Erik Menendez’s age. He is 53 years old, not 54.

This article was first published on: NBCNews.com