Erik Menendez and Lyle Menendez in 1992. VINCE BUCCI/AFP via Getty Images
The Los Angeles District Attorney says he supports Erik and Lyle Menendez’s request for clemency from California Governor Gavin Newsom.
“I strongly support clemency for Erik and Lyle Menendez, who are currently serving sentences of life without possibility of parole,” George Gascón said Wednesday, October 30, in a press release. “They have respectively served 34 years and have continued their educations and worked to create new programs to support the rehabilitation of fellow inmates.”
The D.A.’s office stated that the brothers’ defense team submitted the clemency request on Monday, October 28. The office has since sent letters of support to Newsom.
According to Newsom’s official website, clemency can take the form of “a commutation of sentence,” which involves a reduced sentence, or a “pardon,” which provides “relief from punishment” and restores some civil rights for people who have been convicted of a crime.
“We have dual-tracks. I am doing everything possible, I’ve said publicly, I want them home not just for Thanksgiving but for Joan’s 93rd and to celebrate with Aunt Terry as well,” Mark Geragos, an attorney representing Erik, 53, and Lyle, 56, told TMZ on Tuesday, October 29.
Geragos, 67, was referring to Joan VanderMolen, the sister of murder victim Kitty Menendez (Erik and Lyle’s mother), and Terry Barait, the sister of murder victim José Menendez (the brothers’ father).
The Menendez brothers were sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1996 for the murder of Kitty and José and remain incarcerated at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.
Gascón requested on October 24 during a press conference that the brothers be resentenced amid renewed public interest as a result of the Netflix limited series Monsters, and the documentary The Menendez Brothers.
Geragos also confirmed during his TMZ interview that if and when a resentencing for Erik and Lyle does take place, his legal team will request that their conviction be changed from murder to involuntary manslaughter.
If granted, the logic behind this change is that the siblings would immediately be released as a result of the prison time they have already served and the fact that they were both under the age of 26 when the crime occurred.
Erik and Lyle were convicted of murdering their parents in their Beverly Hills, California, home in 1989 when the brothers were 18 and 21, respectively.
During Gascón’s October 24 announcement, he said, “They have been in prison for nearly 35 years. I believe that they have paid their debt to society.”
Gascón said he believed that they are “safe to be integrated into society.”