On his first day in office, George Gascón, the district attorney of Los Angeles, said that taking a fresh look at long prison sentences handed down during the high-crime 1990s would be a centerpiece of his agenda as a progressive prosecutor.
His office, he said at his swearing-in ceremony almost four years ago, would work to “correct the injustices of the past.”
On Thursday, Mr. Gascón tried to do just that. At a packed news conference, he announced that he would ask a court to resentence Lyle and Erik Menendez, who are serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after killing their parents in 1989 in the living room of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.
The petition could pave the way for the brothers to walk free, decades after their case captured the attention of the American public in one of the first trials broadcast to the nation on television.
Today, Mr. Gascón is fighting for re-election in a tough race that has him far down in the polls, as many voters express support for a more punitive approach to prosecuting crime and question whether Mr. Gascón’s lenient, reform-driven policies have made Los Angeles less safe.
One of Mr. Gascón’s last major acts in office could very well be helping the Menendez brothers secure their freedom.
In seeking the resentencing over the objections of some within his own office, Mr. Gascón could be nearing the end of his time in office in much of the same way it began — at war with his own staff. Almost from the start, some rank-and-file prosecutors, whose employment is secured by civil service protections, have resisted his efforts at change, filing lawsuits against some of his directives and claiming they were retaliated against for not carrying out his agenda.
At his news conference on Thursday, Mr. Gascón noted the divisions within his office about the decision, saying some prosecutors doubted the brothers’ stated basis for seeking a new sentence — that they killed their parents because their father, Jose Menendez, had been sexually abusing them.
“There are people in the office that strongly believe that the Menendez brothers should stay in prison for the rest of their lives, and they do not believe they were molested,” Mr. Gascón said. “And there are people in the office that strongly believe they should be released immediately and that they were in fact molested.”
Mr. Gascón’s move on the Menendez case fits within his progressive agenda of offering leniency to young offenders — Lyle was 21 at the time of the murders, and Erik was 18 — and reviewing decades-old sentences he believes were unduly harsh.
Over the last four years, he said, his office has successfully sought to have more than 300 people resentenced, including 28 who had been convicted of murder. Still, his critics have questioned the timing of the decision in the Menendez case, so close to the election, saying Mr. Gascón did so for the media attention in the middle of a campaign in which he has brought in far less in donations than his conservative challenger.
“Throughout his disastrous tenure as D.A., Gascón has consistently prioritized celebrity cases over the rights of crime victims, showing more interest in being in the spotlight than in upholding justice,” Michele Hanisee, a deputy district attorney who is president of the union that represents rank-and-file prosecutors, said in a statement.
But Mr. Gascón said on Thursday, “there’s nothing political about this.”
He said his office had been reviewing the case for more than a year, after lawyers for the brothers filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that new evidence supporting the brothers’ claims of abuse had been unearthed. He said he decided to speed up a decision after a recent Netflix docudrama on the case — just the latest of numerous television productions on the case over the years — resulted in a deluge of calls to his office from the media.
“Our office got flooded with requests for information, and even though this case was already scheduled to be heard in late November, I decided to move this forward because, quite frankly, we didn’t have enough resources to handle all the requests, and one of the things that I strive to do in this office is be very transparent,” he said.
Less than two weeks before the election, Mr. Gascón, a former police officer in Los Angeles who also served two terms as the district attorney in San Francisco, is trailing his opponent, Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor, by 30 points, according to a poll commissioned by the University of California, Berkeley, and The Los Angeles Times. Voters believe Mr. Hochman is better suited to bring crime down and repair dysfunction in the office, the poll showed.
A loss by Mr. Gascón would deal a serious blow to a national movement to elect progressive prosecutors, as the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is the nation’s largest prosecutor’s office.
Mr. Hochman, who hasn’t addressed the merits of the Menendez case, attacked Mr. Gascón for the timing of his decision. “By releasing it now, Gascón has cast a cloud over the fairness and impartiality of his decision, allowing Angelenos to question whether the decision was correct or just another desperate political move by a D.A. running a losing campaign scrambling to grab headlines through a made-for-TV decision.”
In many ways, Mr. Gascón found a middle path in deciding on the brothers’ fate. Instead of arguing for the brothers be resentenced for manslaughter, which could have allowed them to be released immediately, he is asking that they be resentenced to life with the possibility of parole for murder. If a judge agrees, the brothers would then be eligible for parole, putting their future in the hands of the state parole board.
About an hour after Mr. Gascón’s news conference on Thursday, the Menendez brothers’ family and lawyers gathered at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles for yet another news conference.
“I think it’s important to note for those who are, I suppose, cynical that say, oh, it’s a political move, it was only done for the election,” said Mark Geragos, a lawyer for the brothers, “I’m here to tell you that before there was ever any talk of an election, before there was ever any talk of whether or not he was down in the polls or anything else, this D.A. had taken seriously our writ of habeas corpus.”
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