After Lyle and Erik Menendez were resentenced on Tuesday, paving the way for their possible release after more than three decades in prison, one of the first things their lawyer, Mark J. Geragos, did was make a phone call.
Leslie Abramson, the brothers’ defense attorney at their trials in the 1990s who found herself parodied on “Saturday Night Live,” had in recent years warned Mr. Geragos that his efforts to free the brothers were doomed, in spite of the groundswell of support on social media.
“No amount of TikTokers,” he recalled Ms. Abramson telling him, “was ever going to change anything.”
Facing the bank of television cameras staking out the courthouse, Mr. Geragos told reporters he had just left a message for his old friend.
“And so, Leslie, I will tell you it’s a whole different world we live in now,” he said. He continued, “We have evolved. This is not the ’90s anymore.”
Indeed, over the last many months, the culture and politics of 1990s America seemed as much under the legal microscope as the horrific details of the Menendez brothers’ crimes and what witnesses described as the exemplary lives they led in prison ever since.
At times, putting that decade on trial felt like a legal strategy by the brothers’ lawyers. In court, Mr. Geragos often invoked the criminal justice policies of the era — three-strikes laws, punitive long sentences and a rising prison population — to argue that under today’s mores the brothers merited a second chance. During his closing argument at Tuesday’s hearing, Mr. Geragos described the time as a “crazy, collective, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality we had.”
When the brothers stormed into the den of their family’s Beverly Hills mansion in the summer of 1989 and shotgunned their parents to death, Los Angeles was on the cusp of a tumultuous era. By the time the brothers went on trial for the first time, in 1993, the city was still reeling from the deadly riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case.
The first trial was one of the first to be televised gavel to gavel to a national audience and foreshadowed the public’s obsession with the O.J. Simpson trial, and the explosion of true-crime programming today. The brothers were tried together but each with their own juries, which heard the brothers’ assertions that they had been molested by their father and had killed out of fear. Neither jury could reach a verdict, so a mistrial was declared.
By the time their second trial began, just after the acquittal of Mr. Simpson in 1995, the judge changed the rules, banning cameras in the courtroom and limiting testimony about sexual abuse. The changes were seen at the time as a reaction to the acquittals of Mr. Simpson and the officers in the Rodney King case, which had embarrassed law enforcement officials. (Years later a federal appeals court judge suggested that the rules were unfairly changed to improve the chances of a conviction.)
Without being able to consider a lesser charge of manslaughter, as the jurors in the first trial could, the brothers were convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole.
“It was clear politics had a major impact on the second trial,” said Robert Rand, who has covered the case since 1989 and has written the book, “The Menendez Murders.” “Because the D.A.’s office had suffered a string of major high-profile case defeats.”
How popular culture treated the story, regularly mocking the brothers as spoiled kids who invented the claims of sexual abuse and killed for their inheritance, regularly came up in court during the resentencing process.
“It has been a relentless examination of our family in the public eye,” said Anamaria Baralt, a cousin who testified on the Menendez brothers’ behalf and spoke about their being “the butt of every joke” on “Saturday Night Live” and other late-night shows in the 1990s. “It has been a nightmare.”
Another cousin, Tamara Lucero Goodell, said the vilification of late-night talk show hosts, like Jay Leno, left her “incredibly private” and “closed off.”
Mr. Rand said he was one of the few reporters at the time who took the sexual abuse claims seriously. “I was dating another reporter who was covering the case, and she would tell me that the other reporters covering the trial were ridiculing me behind my back because I was going on Donahue and Oprah and these ’90s TV shows and saying I believed Lyle and Erik Menendez,” he said.
Today, the media landscape looks very different, and the brothers have arguably benefited from that new landscape. Two shows on Netflix last year helped inject momentum into a slow-moving legal process, and new interest in the brothers’ fate was fueled by campaigns on TikTok and other social media by younger people who felt the brothers were mistreated in the 1990s.
Last fall, George Gascón, then the district attorney of Los Angeles, filed a petition asking a court to resentence the brothers. But Mr. Gascón, who had come into office promising to unwind many of the policies of the 1990s by focusing on rehabilitation and less punitive sentences, lost his re-election bid to Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor.
Mr. Hochman is a more traditional prosecutor, emphasizing the rights of victims and taking a tougher line on sentencing. He came out against the resentencing of the brothers, saying they had not demonstrated “full insight” into their crimes.
In court, Mr. Geragos has called the prosecutors “’90s Neanderthals.” In an interview with NewsNation, he said that Mr. Hochman “was elected because the ’90s were calling, and they wanted their D.A.’s office back.”
One of the witnesses who testified in support of resentencing was Jonathan Colby, a retired judge from Florida who has worked with the brothers inside prison training puppies to work with wounded combat veterans and autistic children. Mr. Colby said that, as a judge overseeing criminal cases in the 1990s, he was a law-and-order judge who almost always imposed the toughest sentence possible. “Unfortunately, I was proud of that,” he said.
He said that his association with the brothers changed his mind about the role of prison, and hoped that, if they were to be released, he could work with them to educate judges about the possibilities of rehabilitation. “I never thought prisons were capable, or prisoners were capable, of rehabilitating themselves,” he said.
After California’s prisons became so overcrowded during the 1990s, a U.S. Supreme Court decision ordering the state to reduce its inmate count led to a series of legislative reforms, including the resentencing law that allowed the brothers to have their case reconsidered in court.
When the brothers said they had killed because they had been sexually abused by their father, prosecutors and some in the media treated the claims with skepticism. (At trial a prosecutor said, “Men cannot be raped since they lack the necessary equipment to actually be raped.”)
“If they were the Menendez sisters they wouldn’t be sitting here,” Mr. Geragos said in court, pointing to the brothers who appeared on a screen from prison, wearing blue jumpsuits.
When Lyle Menendez arrived in state prison in 1996 after his conviction, he said that one of the things that boosted his spirits during that dark time was the number of sexual abuse victims who sent him letters.
“I received a lot of ridicule in the ‘90s about it but also a lot of support, and a lot of victims reaching out, appreciating that, and finding their voice through mine,” Lyle Menendez said on a recent podcast interview with TMZ.
Last fall, as efforts to free the brothers gathered momentum following the release of a Netflix series from the producer Ryan Murphy, Gov. Gavin Newsom weighed in, saying on his podcast, “I think our parents would remember Manson as an indelible thing. But for us, I think it was O.J. and the Menendez brothers, which were so much a part of the narrative of our lives.”
After Judge Michael V. Jesic said on Tuesday that he would reduce the brothers’ sentences, making them immediately eligible for parole, and that the case was now in the hands of the governor. Governor Newsom has said he would also consider clemency.
“No doubt what Ryan Murphy did with this series really lit things up,” Mr. Newsom said on his podcast last year. “I think social media has lit things up. I don’t know about you, but I’ll tell you, I can’t even tell you how many times my kids online have said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with the Menendez brothers?’”
Tim Arango is a correspondent covering national news. He is based in Los Angeles.
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