A day after his younger brother was denied parole at the conclusion of a grueling 10-hour hearing, Lyle Menendez saw his own hopes of freedom after nearly 30 years behind bars evaporate.
“The panel has found today that there are still signs” Menendez is a potential risk to the public, declared Parole Commissioner Julie Garland and Deputy Parole Commissioner Patrick Reardon to the older Menendez brother as he participated via video feed from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego.
After going through the reasoning behind the denial and the violations that Menendez has been cited for while in prison, Garland offered a note of hope. “This denial is not …the end,” she said. “It’s a way for you to spend some time to demonstrate, to practice what you preach about who you are, who you want to be.”
After hours and hours of questioning and some chaos, the conclusion Friday by the two-person parole board brings to an end at least for the next few years, the Menendez brothers’ hard fought battle the past 18 months to get out of prison after being sentenced to life without parole back in 1996 after two trials.
With so many members of the family in attendance today, like Thursday, the admittedly disappointed relatives proclaimed “this is not the end of the road.” They went on to say of the brothers: “Both will go before the Board again, and their habeas petition remains under review. In the meantime, we know they will take time to reflect on the Board’s recommendations and will continue to lead, mentor, and build programs that support rehabilitation and hope for others.”
Like his brother Erik, who can’t apply for another parole hearing until 2028, Lyle Menendez can seek a review of Friday’s decision based on factual inaccuracies that may impact the final outcome — but the success of such a move could be a long shot. As it stands right now Lyle Menendez can’t reapply for parole for 36 months.
Still, after nearly 11 hours, at one point late in the day Friday it looked like today’s proceedings might go off the rails as it as revealed audio of part of Thursday’s hearing for Erik Menendez has been released publicly.
“It’s highly unusual,” exclaimed Menendez attorney Heidi Rummel. “It’s another attempt to make this a public spectacle,” the lawyer emphatically added, calling the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s release of audio without family members’ permission a blow to the state’s victims bill of rights. “It’s ironic to me that we are sitting here for hours talking about Mr. Menendez following CDCR policy, and they are not following their own policy,” Rummel went on to say, asking for an adjournment as she felt today’s hearing had lost its impartiality.
The Commissioners later told the hearing that the state has actually had a policy that anyone who requests an audio file of a hearing may receive it, and
As Menendez family members screamed at the Parole Board and the Deputy DA on the screens over the SNAFU, Rummel said “we came into these hearings hoping and expecting a fair and impartial hearing where Mr. Menendez could be heard, be considered and be understood.” The attorney then, seeding what will surely be an attempt to overturn today’s decision, told the hearing: “And we have a public spectacle and this has exacerbated it twenty-fold. And we now have family members who are not going to speak.”
As has been well documented, then 21-year-old Princeton student Lyle and 19-year-old Erik murdered their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez in the family’s Beverly Hills home on the night of August 20, 1989. The brothers, who went back for more annunciation to reload and finish off their mother (which Lyle today like Erik yesterday now says he regrets) as she crawled away already wounded, have long insisted the fatal shootings were because of years of sexual abuse that both of them suffered at the hands of their record company exec father.
Earlier in the virtual hearing, which formally started at 9:03 am PT today with the brothers’ lawyer Rummel (who was with Erik Menendez for Thursday’s hearing), L.A. County Deputy DA Ethan Millius, officials from the state’s CDCR, and family members also attending remotely, Commissioner Garland praised the allegedly rehabilitation seeking Menendez for his “clearly heartfelt, well-written, informative” submissions to the Board.
However, Garland also dug deep on the relationship Lyle had with his father, the alleged abuse he suffered and then his brother becoming the target of the abuse when Lyle was in his early teens, as well as Lyle’s own often undiscussed abuse of Erik. The commissioner also returned again and again to the credibility and truthfulness of the older Menendez sibling – especially in the years after the murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez.
Looking over the risk assessment report on Menendez being at a “moderate risk” of violence if let out on parole, Garland at one point late Friday, bluntly said that she thought the actual record of his various prison violations like having an illegal phone, were much more “deceitful” and intentional than he was letting on in the hearing.
Even though Menendez himself called a March 2024 violation a wake-up call (no pun intended, I think) about his conduct, Garland noted he soon afterwards did it again and presently cut off from family visits for the next three years.
“Even though you fooled your entire family about you being the murderer, and you recruited all these people to help you … you don’t think that’s being a good liar?” Garland asked Menendez earlier in the day, who repeated his answer in the negative. Citing the various explanations he and his brother initially provided after their parents’ death, the $100,000 and more spending sprees they went on, efforts to destroy an unfriendly will and scripting responses for witnesses, and even “escape plans from jail,” the commissioner pointed what she termed Menendez’s “sophistication of the web of lies and manipulation you demonstrated afterwards.”
If that sentiment from Commissioner Garland played a factor in today’s denial of Lyle Menendez’s parole, the top priority “post-conviction factors” spotlighted by Deputy Parole Commissioner Patrick Reardon in her questioning disclosed a spotty prison record at best from the older sibling. As made evident by Commissioner Robert Barton in his denial Thursday of Erik Menendez’s parole for at three more years, the incarcerated’s actions in the joint spoke much louder than their words or promises — especially when it comes to public safety.
Amidst the infractions, for Lyle Menendez, like Erik Menendez, it was illegal cell phones in prison that proved the sticky wicket to his getting out.
“I had convinced myself that this wasn’t a means that was harming anyone but myself in a rule violation,” Menendez replied as Reardon asked again and again how he could square the repeated incident being caught with a phone he wasn’t supposed to have with being a good prisoner.
“I would never call myself a model incarcerated person,” Menendez exclaimed under questioning. “I would say that I’m a good person, that I spent my time helping people, that I’m very open and accepting.” Harking to previous mention of his Menendez added: “I’m the guy that officers will come to to resolve conflicts …At the time I didn’t feel that using the phone was inconsistent with that.”
That didn’t appear to go over well with Dep. Commissioner Reardon, who followed up with wanting to know why Menendez even needed a hidden cell phone to communicate with his relatives if he already had access to a tablet for pretty much the same purpose. That line of questioning set off a skirmish between the CDCR official and Menendez attorney Rummel about taking things offline so to speak and to discuss the matter confidentiality.
At that junction, the hearing took a recess.
Upon reconvening, and Commissioner Garland determining the already pretty locked away hearing would not go (further) behind closed doors, the matter of Menendez and cell phones, of which he had several violations over the years, came up again. “I felt like the phone was a way to protect …privacy,” Menendez admitted, saying that because his correspondence on his tablet was monitored by prison staff he believed portions of what should have been private conversations were being sold to media outlets.
After Menendez lawyer Rummel and Dep. DA Millius spoke, Menendez cousin and very public advocate Anamaira Baralt addressed the board, like she did Thursday for Erik Menendez. “Lyle has not been a violent person in his entire life,” Baralt said. “He is not a violent person today. In 54 years, I have not heard Lyle raise his voice, not once.”
In a case that up until just a few weeks ago many assumed was a slam dunk on the Menendezs’ release, Baralt’s words, along with those of other family members, proved no more convincing today than they had yesterday.
Increasingly forgotten in the decades after their media circus trials of the early cable age, the brothers would have likely had no chance of even thinking about getting out if not for the much watched success of Netflix and Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story series and some Peacock documentaries claiming new evidence. The Emmy nominated Monsters was seen as a potential political lifeline to incumbent and sometimes media savvy LA County DA George Gascón as he suddenly took an interest in the case and recommended resentencing for the brothers.
Even though current LA DA Nathan Hochman won the race in a landslide last November, the resentencing process as well as an ongoing May 2023 filed habeas petition the brothers have before the courts seeking a new trial were still active.
Hochman came out against both the resentencing and a new trial – as he restated earlier this week.
However, the DA seemed irrelevant on May 13 when LA Superior Court Judge Michael Jesic resentenced Erik and Lyle Menendez to 50 years to life — thereby making them instantly eligible to seek parole. Leading us to yesterday and today, after a delay to allow the brothers to adequately prepare, the parole attempt took the slots offered by a clemency process already ordered by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
In an alternative universe, where one or both of the brothers had been granted parole, they would have had to stay behind bars as the Board of Paroles chief counsel gave the recommendation a final legal and administrative overhaul When that is done, which could take weeks, then the grant would be sent to Gov. Newsom for final approval – which the ambitious Democrat could give, reject, or seek more clarification on.
Under the laws of the Golden State, Newsom could still step in and even grant clemency to the Menendez brothers. Yet, with the relative mild (by California standards) prohibition on future parole bids by the siblings out of this week’s hearings, it is likely a dilemma the governor has no interest in dealing with now.
The post Lyle Menendez Denied Parole For 1989 Shotgun Murder Of Parents One Day After Brother Also Failed To Gain Freedom From Prison appeared first on Deadline.
