For years, Chandrika M. Kelso has worked with Lyle and Erik Menendez in prison, as they became leaders in nonviolence workshops, meditation groups and a hospice program for older, ailing inmates at R.J. Donovan Correction Facility near San Diego.
She heard the gossip on the yards at the prison this year, as the brothers’ case returned to the public spotlight, propelled by two new shows on Netflix and social media campaigns by young people. Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would consider clemency, and a judge in Los Angeles reduced their sentence of life without parole, giving them an immediate chance at freedom.
Many inmates have been envious, Ms. Kelso said, as they learned that the governor was weighing in on the brothers’ life sentences. “That’s not something that’s lost on the other inmates who got life.”
But she also hears another sentiment: “Hey, if they go home, I have hope that I’ll go home.”
Indeed, while the case has played out as a reckoning with culture and politics of the 1990s — the era’s tough-on-crime policies, the media obsession with celebrity and attitudes about sexual abuse — it has also raised a fundamental moral question. Who deserves a second chance?
Many observers, fellow inmates and participants in the case believe that, while celebrity has certainly worked to the advantage of the brothers, their case may end up helping other inmates who are not well known, and have not benefited from celebrity supporters and media attention.
“There are thousands of people like Lyle and Erik who don’t have the celebrity, don’t have the personality, and don’t have the good fortune of supportive family, to lift their case up,” said Michael Romano, one of their lawyers.
Mr. Romano was an unlikely addition to the brothers’ legal team. Not that he didn’t believe the brothers, who murdered their parents more than three decades ago in their Beverly Hills mansion, had been in prison long enough.
But Mr. Romano has devoted his career to representing people serving life sentences for lesser crimes under California’s Three Strikes law, seeking to persuade courts to reconsider their sentences. Most of his clients are poor and Black or Latino. Yet many, like the Menendez brothers, suffered from childhood sexual abuse or other trauma.
Among his clients is a man who was living in a facility for homeless veterans and who was raped as a child, and is serving 28 years to life for attacking another veteran with his cane. Another is serving 45 years to life for accosting a man on a street and attempting to steal his wallet and phone, before the man ran away. Yet another is a man serving 43 years to life who stole four bottles of vodka from a liquor store and yelled a threat.
So, during a prison visit with the Menendez brothers, Mr. Romano brokered a deal: If they ever walked free, they would speak out on behalf of other inmates who are not famous.
“I want them to say, when they walk out of prison and there are hundreds of microphones in front of them, to say, ‘We’re grateful but there are thousands of others behind us,’” said Mr. Romano, who teaches at Stanford Law School and runs its Three Strikes Project.
The brothers are now as close to freedom as they have ever been.
Their original sentences of life without the possibility of parole were reduced this year, making them eligible for parole. They will have their first parole hearings this week — Erik on Thursday and Lyle on Friday.
Even if they are denied parole on their first try, as a majority of inmates are, Erik, 54, and Lyle, 57, could seek parole again in three years. And there is an another legal path: The brothers’ lawyers are arguing for a new trial based on new evidence that they were sexually molested by their father, Jose Menendez.
The question of second chances is one California policymakers have been grappling with since a Supreme Court decision in 2011 ordered the state to reduce the population of its overcrowded prisons. In response, the state has passed several measures allowing courts to reconsider old sentences.
“California led in mass incarceration in its building up its prison and jail populations, and now is leading the way out,” said Tom Nosewicz, the legal director of the California Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, a state agency.
Still, of the thousands of people who have been released under the new laws, very few, if any, were serving life without parole for a double murder. In many cases, the law was used to aid people who had committed lesser crimes that ended up being the third strike that resulted in a life sentence.
That the Menendez brothers, with their double murder convictions, might be granted parole underscores how their celebrity has helped them.
But case has already had a major impact on the justice system.
Governor Newsom is making changes to the clemency process that is likely to lead to more opportunities to be released for those serving life without parole, if they can demonstrate that they have been rehabilitated.
Under current practice, an inmate must find a way to get on the governor’s radar, a process critics say is opaque and often based on political connections. If the governor decides to grant clemency, the Board of Parole is asked to weigh in and produce a risk assessment.
Under the proposed new guidelines, the process would begin with the board, which would consider a wide range of older inmates who have served long sentences like the Menendez brothers. It would then bring to the governor the cases the board recommends for early release.
The Menendez case returned to the courts just as California vastly expanded the number of inmates eligible to seek resentencing.
Last year, a new law went into effect that gives judges the independent authority to review virtually every conviction. “Almost everybody in prison is eligible for reconsideration,” Mr. Romano said.
So far, the number of people resentenced under that law are “minuscule,” he said, but the eligibility is “enormous.”
The biggest problem for many inmates is getting noticed. Without a popular podcast or a hit Netflix show to propel their cases, the only option for many is to fill out by hand a form available in prison libraries and send the form to a judge.
The vast majority of petitions are denied.
One place where they are welcome is the fourth floor of the courthouse in Long Beach. There, Judge Daniel J. Lowenthal of Los Angeles Superior Court, has become perhaps the most visible judicial proponent of resentencing.
Last year, he received a handwritten plea from Ernesto Murillo, a former gang member serving a sentence of 110-years to life for a 2008 shooting in which a 6-year-old boy was wounded. In his note to the court, Mr. Murillo wrote that in prison he had “learned to process my childhood trauma and to identify the root cause of all my negative warped beliefs and actions.”
Judge Lowenthal, after reviewing the thousands of pages of Mr. Murillo’s prison file, scheduled a hearing and released him. “What Mr. Murillo has shown this court is that people can transform, that people who commit terrible acts are not irredeemable, and he has shown that he is worthy of re-entering society,” Judge Lowenthal said.
He has reduced the sentences for several people and released them, and he has pushed for state resources to set up dedicated resentencing courts.
Judge Lowenthal said a case like the Menendez brothers is important because it helps generate public support for the notion that even those who commit the most heinous of crimes can find redemption. “The public I think sees these individuals as men who are close to 60 years old who have spent close to four decades in prison and I think by all measures are not a threat to public safety,” he said.
Mr. Romano hopes the Menendez case will provide judges with “permission to say, ‘Oh, no matter how notorious the case, no matter how gruesome the crime, it makes sense to go back and revisit these defendants and see if the sentences should be adjusted.’”
Already, even before the parole board makes a decision about the brothers’ fate, Mr. Newsom has been publicly wrestling with the celebrity factor.
“Notoriety works in both ways,” Mr. Newsom said recently on his podcast in a discussion with the Hollywood showrunner Ryan Murphy, whose Netflix series last year, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” helped galvanize public support for the brothers. “It works absolutely for you. But it is a sword used against you at the same time.”
The governor continued, “There are a lot of other people in prison that don’t get any attention, that don’t even get in front of the parole board. That don’t have advocates. That don’t have Kim Kardashian making phone calls.”
That leaves Mr. Newsom with a lot to weigh “It’s trying to balance all that.”
Tim Arango is a correspondent covering national news. He is based in Los Angeles.
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