Menendez brothers' resentencing court dates delayed until April
The Menendez brothers' resentencing hearings have been pushed back to April after they were set to appear before a judge next week in their pursuit of early release.
Lyle and Erik Menendez have been serving sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for the August 1989 murder of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, at the family's Beverly Hills home. The court dates were set after former Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón recommended resentencing for the brothers last fall. However, the county's new top prosecutor, District Attorney Nathan Hochman, withdrew that motion last week. He opposes resentencing because, he said, the brothers have not taken full responsibility for killing their parents and have lied about it being an act of self defense.
The newly scheduled resentencing hearings are set for April 17 and 18, with another court date on April 11. CBS News Los Angeles has reached out to the DA's office for more information about the April 11 hearing.
On June 13, Lyle and Erik Menendez will have another hearing, this one related to their case for clemency. Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the state parole board to perform a risk assessment to determine whether they pose a risk to public safety. He has said he will take the board's report and the hearing into consideration as he decides whether to grant clemency.
Aside from the possibility of resentencing or clemency, in another potential path to freedom, the brothers' attorneys filed a habeas petition asking a court to toss out their first-degree murder convictions and grant them a new trial. Hochman said the DA's office is asking the court to deny the petition, saying the credibility of alleged new evidence helping their case has been called into question since the brothers lied to authorities many times.
While Lyle and Erik Menendez have admitted to shooting their parents to death, they maintained over the course of two trials and in the years since that they did so in self-defense — saying they feared for their lives after suffering physical and sexual abuse for years. In 1996, a jury rejected that defense and convicted them of first-degree murder.
Hochman said they lied about this defense and haven't admitted to that, the grounds of his decision to oppose resentencing. He said the prior motion made under Gascón did not take into consideration whether they have taken responsibility for the crimes.
When he announced his decision last week, he said the brothers have also not admitted to other circumstances in the case against them, such as asking one of their girlfriends to lie and testify that their father had raped her.
"As a full examination of the record reveals, the Menendez brothers have never come clean and admitted that they lied about their self-defense as well as suborned perjury and attempted to suborn perjury by their friends for the lies, among others, of their father violently raping Lyle's girlfriend, their mother poisoning the family, and their attempt to get a handgun the day before the murders," Hochman said in a statement, later saying that prosecutors would reconsider resentencing if the brothers came clean.
"If they were to finally come forward and unequivocally and sincerely admit and completely accept responsibility for their lies of self-defense and the attempted suborning of perjury they engaged in, then the Court should weigh such new insight into the analysis of rehabilitation and resentencing — as will the People," Hochman said.
