Recently, a Los Angeles judge delayed a hearing for Erik and Lyle Menendez in their bid to be resentenced for the murder of their parents 35 years ago. Renewed interest in the brothers’ case, fueled by Netflix’s recent docudrama series and documentary on the brothers, has drawn celebrity advocates to call for their release, alongside an army of TikTok accounts. Unfortunately for the brothers, social advocacy rarely corresponds to judicial change.
The Menendez brothers shot and killed their parents in August of 1989, when Erik was 18 and Lyle was 21. For months, the murders went unsolved, and the police believed that perhaps the parents had been victims of a mafia hit. During that time, the brothers went on a spending spree, buying cars, private tennis lessons, even a restaurant. When the truth finally emerged, the world was shocked. How could two young men born into privilege squander not only their futures but also quite possibly their lives?
There was a televised trial, the men sobbing on the stand, detailing years of abuse at the hands of their father. Sexual abuse, emotional abuse, coercion, violence. And their mother — where was she in all of this? Drinking away the woes of her family, failing in her sacred duty to protect her children.
The trial ended in hung juries, and Judge Stanley Weisberg declared a mistrial. So the men were tried again in 1995, and this time it was not televised. Judge Weisberg seemed to say enough with the shenanigans and less of this messy talk of abuse. He barred much of the evidence of the sexual perversions of Lyle and Erik’s father, Jose Menendez. The trial ended in convictions for each brother, and sentences of life without parole.
I was in college and then graduate school as the fate of the Menendez brothers played out. Their lurid travails were a sort of background static for the orderly world in which I lived, attending classes, struggling with rent and groceries. What did rich kids have to be so upset over?
Like so many people, I now understand more of how abuse and trauma play out in a person’s life. I understand that a male victim of abuse feels the pain no less than a woman, a child even more so. What I question is whether judges have absorbed this new understanding of abuse, and whether a court today would reach a different verdict.
Our judicial system, much like law enforcement, generally operates with a narrow view of an event. Though abuse is almost always a protracted experience, prosecutors frequently focus on the brief timelines surrounding the crime in question. The Menendez brothers describe enduring years of trauma perpetrated by their father. And trauma is now understood to be cumulative, building with each event, rewiring the brain one awful moment at a time.
Society shows greater leniency toward certain groups who take actions under duress than for others. Police officers, for example, often either legitimize their use of violence, or are excused because it is understood that they were in a very stressful situation. For abuse victims who become defendants, such consideration is rarely given. Why as a society are we so willing to look the other way when the violence comes not from a stranger but from within a victim’s own home?
Part of the problem lies in the language we use to describe such acts: Substitute the word “torture” for the word “abuse” and our understanding of the experience is immediately reframed. What the brothers described suffering was years of torture. Domestic torture. You feel it in your gut. But long-term abuse tends to be downplayed in our courtrooms and in our entertainment.
“The Menendez Brothers,” the Netflix documentary, shows a clip where Erik recounts from the witness stand that he had been raped by his father by the time he was 10 or 11 years old. Erik recalled that he once said no as his father tried to assault him; Jose stormed out of the room and returned with a knife, which he held to Erik’s throat. “I should kill you and next time I will,” he recalled his father said.
Erik also recounted how his father would ask him: “What’s going to happen to you if you tell anyone?”
“You will hurt me,” Erik says. No, his father would insist. What happens if you tell?
“You kill me,” he says.
So for years Erik endured the abuse. He understood that his father followed through on threats.
Abuse, even this kind, is not an invitation to lawlessness. But it is a crucial context for actions and decisions made under extreme hardship. It is also, in my view, often a justification.
That Judge Weisberg barred much of the evidence surrounding the abuse allegations from the second Menendez trial was not unusual 30 years ago. And it remains true today that the evidence allowed in any given courtroom is largely a matter of judicial discretion. In a recent study from Stanford Law School’s Criminal Justice Center that I was involved in and wrote about for Times Opinion, we asked women who were incarcerated for homicide whether their attorneys had introduced evidence of their abuse from the day of the killings. Only 22 percent of the 231 women who responded to our question said their attorneys introduced such evidence at trial. Forty-one percent of a group of 166 women incarcerated for homicide said a judge prevented their defense teams from submitting evidence of a history or pattern of abuse. Too often, like members of the media and law enforcement, judges still minimize or bar evidence of abuse in a defendant’s case.
Judges are the gatekeepers of evidence. “Some judges decide that everything before the day in question doesn’t count, or that things that were years ago don’t count,” Cindene Pezzell, director of the National Defense Center for Criminalized Survivors, told me. “And that really undercuts any arguments about the impact of complex lifetime trauma on culpability.”
Take the case of Nikki Addimando. Judge Edward McLoughlin of New York State barred the inclusion of her medical reports going back years, which recorded abuse at the hands of Ms. Addimando’s partner, whom she eventually killed. Judge McLoughlin allowed images of her injuries from those reports as evidence, but not the medical notes themselves — notes in which two different health care workers wrote down Ms. Addimando’s partner’s name as the person responsible for her injuries. This helped the prosecutor spin all manner of fantasy. Perhaps Ms. Addimando was simply into rough sex. Perhaps the injuries came from some other person. The jury found Ms. Addimando guilty and she was sentenced to 19 years to life in prison. (An appellate decision reduced that sentence, and she was freed this January after seven years in prison.)
Ms. Pezzell and her colleagues frequently encounter judges curtailing evidence of abuse, as happened in Ms. Addimando’s case, rather than outright banning it from the courtroom. “When it’s limited to the extent that it becomes meaningless, that’s almost worse,” she says, because then a defendant has fewer grounds for appeal.
Ashley Benefield was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Dec. 3 in Florida for killing her estranged husband. Her defense team wasn’t allowed to introduce text messages or a deputy’s testimony to establish how her husband had stalked her, or how he’d injured animals and admitted once in family court to shooting a gun into the ceiling to make Ms. Benefield “shut up.” The judge also prohibited DNA evidence and family court depositions that corroborated her version of events. Jack O’Keefe, a member of Ms. Benefield’s defense team, said Judge Matt Whyte seemed so biased, “it was like having two prosecutors” in the courtroom.
Judges still often ask why the victim didn’t just leave. The most dangerous time for victims of abuse is often when they are trying to do so. Jose Menendez told Erik that he would not allow him to leave home to attend college. This had been Erik’s exit plan, the fantasy keeping him afloat. The refusal prompted Erik finally to disclose to his brother what he had endured, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately led to the brothers taking their parents’ lives.
What no judge ever seems to ask is: What happens when a victim does manage to leave? More than three-quarters of female domestic homicide victims were stalked in the year leading up to their deaths. Where could the brothers have gone to truly and permanently escape their father? Perhaps they would have wound up like Cheryl Chianese-Cavalli, whose ex-boyfriend Paul Senecal continually violated her order of protection. Yet Judge Edward McLoughlin — the same judge in Ms. Addimando’s case — allowed Mr. Senecal to be released with a GPS ankle bracelet. Eventually, Mr. Senecal went to Ms. Chianese-Cavalli’s home and fatally stabbed her 29-year-old daughter, Melanie.
Many people have noted that we know much more about domestic and sexual violence today than we did in the 1990s. This is true. We know how devastating abuse can be and how trauma lasts a lifetime. What remains unclear is whether the judiciary has absorbed enough of this understanding to decide that the Menendez brothers have suffered enough and deserve a different kind of future.
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