In prison since 1996 for the 1989 brutal murder of his wealthy parents, Erik Menendez today was denied his attempt at parole after a very long and sometimes jarring virtual hearing. He will not be eligible to try for early release again for until 2028.
“While we respect the decision, today’s outcome was of course disappointing and not what we hoped for,” the Menendez family said in a statement after the parole board decision was announced. “But our belief in Erik remains unwavering and we know he will take the Board’s recommendation in stride, the relatives, many of whom participated in the hours long hearing Thursday, added. The family concluded: “Tomorrow, we turn our attention to Lyle’s hearing. And while it is undoubtedly difficult, we remain cautiously optimistic and hopeful that the commissioner will see in Lyle what so many others have: a man who has taken responsibility, transformed his life, and is ready to come home.”
“This crime is about my family,” Menendez said Thursday in the much longer than usual procedure with lawyers, district attorneys, and family of multiple generations present. “It’s about what they’ve endured. What they’ve suffered. What they’ve gone through, and that’s not about me at all. The real impact of this is about them.”
“I just want my family to understand that I am so unimaginably sorry for what I have put them through from August 20, 1989 until this day, and this hearing,” Menendez added in his closing statement late this afternoon before over a dozen relatives spoke in favor of his release. “I know that they have been here for me and they’re here for me today, but I want them to know that this should be about them. It’s about them and if I ever get the chance at freedom I want the healing to be about them.”
While Erik Menendez was denied parole today even after being resentenced on May 13 to 50 years to life along with his brother Lyle Menendez, the older sibling may still have a chance to walking out a free man in the near future.
The ruling to kept the 54-year-old Erik Menendez, who was sentenced to life without parole in the mid-1990s, behind bars comes just over 36 years after helping to kill his father Jose Menendez and his allegedly blind eye turning mother Kitty, (who the brother went to get more bullets and reloaded to kill as she was crawling away). Spending decades in various state facilities like Erik Menendez, Lyle Menendez could be walking the streets by as soon as Thanksgiving or the New Year if he is successful where his brother was not.
Starting at 8:45 am PT and running 10 hours, Thursday’s Google Meets hosted hearing before Commissioner Robert Barton and a deputy commissioner, with parole board Executive Officer Scott Wyckoff in attendance too, saw Erik Menendez join remotely from Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, where he has been imprisoned for the past several years. Attorney Heidi Rummel, of Menendez’s large legal team, participated also. Deputy LA County District Attorney Habib Balian logged in from his DTLA office.
Additionally, there were a large number of Menendez family members involved, such as the sibling’s cousin AnnMaria Baralt. The public face of the Menendez relatives in many ways, Baralt was among those who addressed the Parole Board this afternoon. Citing how she and Erik grew up like twins, because of how close in age they are, Baralt pleaded with the commissioners to “end the torture for all of us.”
After some introductory words from Barton, including acknowledging the health issues addled Menendez may be nervous (“Everyone is nervous when they come to a hearing. What I will tell you is to keep breathing.”), things really began at about 9:20 am PT. Speaking about his “impulsive” and “entitled” youth and the relationships with his brother, father and mother, Menendez told the hearing that he felt he had no choice but to kill his parents on August 20, 1989. ““Dad was going to come to my room and rape me that night,” he said Thursday of his record company executive father. “That was going to happen. One way or another. If he was alive, that was going to happen.”
“I was not going to let him come to my room. So I was going to do everything I could to resist.”
As was made evident Thursday, the heart of parole consideration is in great measure if the prisoner is or is not a danger to society and how they have conducted themselves since being Incarcerated. In that context, Commissioner Barton made a point of cutting Menendez off when he tried to get into the specifics of the frequent abuse he says his violent father inflicted on him as a boy and teenager.
Barton and others on the board did spend considerable time going over the infractions that Menendez incurred during his first years in prison, such as threatening behavior to CDCR officials and others, and drug use. More recent violations of inappropriate contact with his wife while their nine-year-old daughter was present, working with prison gangs on a so-called “tax scam” (the mentioning of which seemed to unnerved Menendez), and of having a smartphone he shouldn’t have had were also examined. Though the phone incidents became a focal point, at one junction, when questioning Erik about his relationship with Lyle, Barton accused Menendez of having “lied.” The term was in reference to Menendez not telling Corrections staff that his brother had sexually abused him when they were very young. The accusation by Barton led to some sharp back and forth with attorney Rummel.
For the most part, at least from looking over the pool reports, Menendez, who has been involved in a number of therapy and educational programs while in prison, attempted to own up to his spotty record with an admission he assumed he was never going to get out. When his prospects began to appear to change over the past year, Menende says “consequential thinking” took hold, as he realized “I can’t be doing this” if he really wanted to get out on parole.
Additionally, reaching back further into Menendez’s past, Barton did return several times in today’s hearing to why the then 18-year-old did not leave the Beverly Hills home where the abuse was supposedly happening, and why the brothers purchased the guns that ultimately were used to killed Jose and Kitty Menendez. “When I look back at the person I was then and what I believed about the world and my parents, running away was inconceivable,” Menendez replied, acknowledging his brother Lyle had offered to bring him to Princeton with him. “Running away meant death.”
When asked directly by Barton if the shotgun killings of his parents was self-defense, as the brothers and their lawyers have suggested over the years due to the alleged sexual abuse, Menendez refuted a letter he wrote to that effect, and responded with a simple “No.”
“I wish to God I did not do that,” a stricken Menendez said today of his reloading a shotgun to murder his already wounded mother Kitty the night in 1989 he and his brother killed their parents.
“On that night I saw them as one person,” Menendez continued with reference to the alleged sexual abuse over the years by his father Jose. The murder of Kitty Menendez has long been a complicating factor in the brothers’ high profiled case. “Had she not been in the room, maybe it would have been different.”
The cold and calculated continued shooting of Kitty Menendez has long be one of the thorniest complications in a case that had infortainment and tabloid strewn all over it from the day it became public and the wild spending brothers were arrested.
One of the first first big trials to get near wall-to-wall TV coverage (at least for the first trial, which ended in a mistrial in 1994), the Menendez case was brought back into the public sphere in great part because of Netflix and Ryan Murphy‘s much watched Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story series. Purporting to have unveiled new or new-ish evidence of record executive Jose Menendez’s predatory misconduct, including involving a member of boy band Menudo, documentaries on Peacock and others were clearly influential in then poll sagging ex-LA DA George Gascón taking a new look at the case as his reelection campaign went into the final stretch.
Since taking office, new-ish DA Nathan Hochman has taken a much lower temperature approach to reconsideration of the Menendez case. He eventually came down against a new trial or parole for the brothers – a decision reinforced no doubt by today’s parole denial by Barton and the board.
“The Menendez brothers have never fully accepted responsibility for the horrific murders of their parents, instead continuing to promote a false narrative of self-defense that was rejected by the jury decades ago,” DA Hochman said just this week in language he has been using for months. “We have consistently opposed their release because they have not demonstrated full insight into their crimes or shown that they have been fully rehabilitated, and therefore continue to pose a risk to society,” LA top lawman added.
“We will evaluate our final position based on the evidence presented at the hearing.”
A statement from the DA’s office on today’s Parole Board decision is anticipated later this evening.
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