Erik & Lyle Menendez Deserve a Second Chance

On October 24, 2024, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced he was asking the court to resentence brothers Erik and Lyle Menendez in the 1989 murders of their parents. After two trials - the first ended in a mistrial due to a deadlocked jury - both brothers were convicted on two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances for lying in wait, as well as conspiracy to murder. In the penalty phase of the trial, they were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

If a judge accepts his recommendation, the brothers will be eligible for parole. Gascón stated "I don't believe that manslaughter would have been the appropriate charge given the premeditation that was involved", and "I do believe that the brothers was subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the home and molestation."

As a member of the Drop LWOP Coalition, Felony Murder Elimination Project provides the following statement concerning the case and potential resentencing of Erik and Lyle Menendez.

*****

The DROP LWOP Coalition applauds Los Angeles DA George Gascón’s decision to recommend resentencing for Erik and Lyle Menendez. Joseph Bell is an advocate with the Drop LWOP Coalition and Human Rights Watch and served 24 years of an LWOP sentence before being commuted by Governor Brown and resentenced by San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin. Bell called on District Attorneys across the state to “use their power to review LWOP cases across the board. These sentences have been disproportionately handed out to survivors of abuse, young people, and people of color. Governor Newsom also has the power to accelerate clemency for those serving LWOP, giving them a pathway to review by the Board of Parole. Many were sentenced as youth and have spent decades on their rehabilitation, despite being told there was no point.”

There are over 5,000 people serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) in California prisons—the sentence that Erik and Lyle Menendez have been serving for nearly 35 years. LWOP is a sentence in which a person is sent to prison for the rest of their life with no real pathway to demonstrate their change and growth to seek parole. It is now widely understood as “the other death penalty” and recognized by the United Nations as a form of torture that should be abolished. Those currently incarcerated under LWOP describe it as “a death sentence in slow motion,” arguing that LWOP effectively banishes people from the world outside prisons, dehumanizing them as irredeemable and stripping them of hope. Not only is every person capable of transformation, but over the years our society’s sentencing practices have drastically changed to better account for mitigating factors like childhood trauma, intimate partner violence, and intellectual disabilities that give a fuller picture behind the context of someone’s actions.

There is growing awareness of the arbitrary ways that LWOP gets applied by prosecutors who seek the most extreme sentence because it is easier to prove. Since 1978, California has enacted dozens of new “special circumstances” that prosecutors can charge to require LWOP or death penalty sentencing. If prosecutors add a felony murder special circumstance, for example, they only need to prove participation in an underlying felony during which a death occurs. The defendant need not be the perpetrator of the death to receive LWOP or the death penalty. 90% of people in women’s prisons serving LWOP were sentenced under this law, often being held accountable for the action’s of an abusive partner.

“I served 23 years at the Central California Women’s Facility on an LWOP sentence, spending decades advocating for the rights of so many women who received LWOP in the context of severe domestic violence,” said Kelly Savage-Rodriguez with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. “I was falsely accused of a murder committed by my abusive ex-husband. And my story is not unique.”

Between 1992–2017, the population of people serving LWOP in the US grew by 400% — from 12,453 to over 50,000. 68% of people sentenced to LWOP in California are Black and Latinx. 62% of people sentenced in CA were 25 years or younger at the time of the offense. 71% of people sentenced to LWOP were convicted for the first-time, and the majority are women serving LWOP are survivors of abuse, including sexual violence, childhood abuse, human trafficking, and domestic violence.

“At the age of 12 years old, I started getting molested by my own father,” said Susan Bustamante who served 31 years on an LWOP sentence. “This led to a dynamic of victimization and abuse that played out in all of my relationships, including with a husband who physically and emotionally abused me and threatened to kill me and my family members. Far too many people have been charged with LWOP in this type of environment.”

We join the celebrities, system actors, and the general public who are honoring the second look being offered to the Menendez brothers. It shouldn’t take a Netflix show to shine a light on the injustice of an LWOP sentence. We must extend that same second look to the thousands of people in California suffering the death sentence of life without the possibility of parole.