Menendez brothers granted resentencing hearing

LOS ANGELES (CN) — After more than 35 years in prison, Erik and Lyle Menendez will get a shot at freedom, after a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge decided Friday to allow a resentencing hearing to move forward — over the objections of the county’s new district attorney.

In a Friday hearing, attorneys for both sides accused each other of using the brothers’ case as political fodder, but Superior Court Judge Michael Jesic said that he didn’t believe that either former Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón or current District Attorney Nathan Hochman had acted politically.

The judge concluded that he didn’t find the district attorney’s office’s arguments contesting the brothers’ self-defense claims persuasive.

“There’s no new information,” Jesic said. “None of this shocked me.”

He added that he didn’t believe that “just because something wasn’t in the original petition, we should throw away everything.”

Jesic denied the district attorney office’s motion to withdraw the resentencing petition and set up a hearing for Thursday and Friday of next week. on the merits of whether or not the brothers should be resentenced.

The judge will have the authority to resentence the brothers to time served, which would see them released, or resentence them to life in prison with the possibility of parole, giving them a chance to plead their case before the parole board.

The Menendez brothers, who were convicted in 1996 of the 1989 murders of their parents, claim they’d been suffering from a lifetime of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, Jose, a record executive.

During their two trials, the first of which ended in a hung jury, they said the killings were done in self-defense, out of fear that their parents were about to murder them. They were convicted during their second trial and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Federal and state appellate courts upheld the convictions.

Gascón — known as a progressive criminal justice reformer — filed a motion requesting a resentencing hearing for the brothers in October, weeks before an election he was expected to lose.

He was roundly defeated by Hochman, who pledged to roll back most of Gascón’s policies, and to take another look at the Menendez case. In March, Hochman announced that he would be withdrawing his predecessor’s request, putting the hearing’s future into question.

In a hearing on Friday, Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian argued that Gascón had acted politically, in a desperate attempt to salvage his flailing political career. He said that Gascón’s motion for a resentencing had been rushed and shoddily put together.

Balian’s own analysis, he said, had taken into account the more than 55,000 pages of transcripts from the two trials. As if to drive home his point, Balian spoke for nearly three hours.

Much of his argument focused on why the brothers were undeserving of their freedom — they had failed to show proper remorse for their horrific crime and failed to “understand the severity and depravity of [their] conduct,” he said. Balian argued the brothers’ self-defense argument had been concocted out of thin air, and that they had persisted in the ruse to this day.

“They have been hunkered down in their bunker of lies and deception,” Balian said. “They’re still the same people they were back then. They’re still telling the same lies.”

He said that a 1992 California law that allows for resentencing hearings gave the district attorney’s office “absolute discretion” to request and withdraw a request for a hearing. Withdrawing the petition requires only a “legitimate reason” for doing so, Balian said.

The Menendez brothers’ attorney, Mark Geragos, argued that there was no legitimate reason to withdraw the request.

“The DA cannot giveth and taketh away at a whim,” Geragos said, adding that it was Hochman who was acting politically, not Gascón.

Geragos spent most of his presentation mocking Balian’s argument as a “dog and pony show.”

“This is a show proceeding instituted by a DA who is a throwback to the 1990s,” Geragos said. “They’re intellectually disingenuous.”

Geragos also said that it was untrue that the brothers had shown now remorse for the killings, nor was it true that they had stuck to their self-defense argument, saying that the prosecutors had never even bothered to ask the brothers about the topic lately.

“Today is a good day,” Geragos told the large scrum of reporters waiting outside the courthouse, after the hearing. “Justice won over politics.”

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