After Lyle and Erik Mensendez were enclosed On Tuesday, freeing the road for their possible release after more than three decades in prison, one of the first things that their lawyer, Mark J. Geragos, did, was a phone call.
Leslie Abramson, the defense lawyer of the brothers during their processes in the nineties, who had parodied on ‘Saturday Night Live’, Mr Geragos had warned in recent years that his efforts to free the brothers were doomed, despite the consthnel of support on social media.
“No quantity of Tiktokers,” he remembered that Mrs. Abramson told him, “would ever change something.”
Faced with the bank of television cameras that turn off the courthouse, Mr. Geragos said reporters that he had just left a message for his old friend.
“And so, Leslie, I will tell you that it is a completely different world in which we now live,” he said. He continued: “We have evolved. These are not the 90s anymore.”
Indeed, in the past many months the culture and politics of America from the nineties seemed just as much under the legal microscope as the horrible details of the crimes of the brothers of Mendez and some witnesses described as the exemplary life they have led in prison since then.
Sometimes that felt like a legal strategy for decade by the brothers’ lawyers. In the court, Mr Geragos often called on the criminal law policy of the era-striker laws, punitive long penalties and an increasing prison population to claim that the brothers deserved a second chance under today’s mores. During his final argument during Tuesday’s hearing, Mr Geragos described the time as a “crazy, collective, lock-up-and-throw-away-away-the-key mentality we had.”
In the summer of 1989 the brothers stormed the mansion of their family in Beverly Hills and their parents shot to death, Los Angeles was about to have a tumultuous era. By the time the brothers ended up for the first time, in 1993, the city still staggered of the deadly riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case.
The first test was one of the first to be broadcast on television on television to shoot at a national audience and predict the OJ Simpson test’s obsession and the explosion of True-Crime Programming today. The brothers were tested together, but each with their own juries, who heard the claims of the brothers that they had been molested by their father and had killed fear. Neither of the jury could reach a judgment, so a mistrial was explained.
By the time their second trial began, just after Mr Simpson’s acquittal in 1995, the judge changed the rules that forbade cameras in the courtroom and to limit testimony about sexual abuse. The changes were seen at the time as a reaction to Mr Simpson’s acquittal and the officers in the Rodney King case, who had embarrassed law enforcement officers. (Years later A federal court of the Court of Appeal proposed That the rules were changed unfairly to improve the opportunities for a conviction.)
Without being able to consider a lesser indictment against manslaughter, as the jury members could in the first trial, the brothers were convicted of murder and convicted of life without a conditional release.
“It was clear that politics had a major impact on the second process,” said Robert Rand, who dealt with the case Since 1989 and has written the book ‘The Mendez Murders’. “Because the DA’s office had suffered a series of large controversial case defeat.”
How popular culture treated the story and the brothers regularly mocked as spoiled children who invented and killed the claims of sexual abuse for their inheritance, regularly came to court during the resentment.
“It has been a ruthless study of our family in the public interest,” said Anamaria Baralt, a cousin who testified on behalf of the Menendez-Broers and spoke about their “the butt of each joke” on “Saturday night live” and other late-night shows in the nineties. “It has been a nightmare.”
Another cousin, Tamara Lucero Goodell, said that the defamation of the late-night talk show hosts, such as Jay Leno, left her “incredibly private” and “closed”.
Mr. Rand said that at the time he was one of the few reporters who took the claims of sexual abuse seriously. “I went out with another reporter who covered the case, and she would tell me that the other reporters who covered the process were ridiculous because I went Donahue and Oprah and these TV shows from the 90s and said I believed Lyle and Erik Menendez,” he said.
Nowadays the media landscape looks very different and the brothers have demonstrably benefited from that new landscape. Two shows on Netflix last year helped to enter the momentum in a slowly moving legal process, and new interest in the fate of the brothers was fed by campaigns on Tiktok and other social media by younger people who felt that the brothers were being mistreated in the nineties.
Last fall, George Gascón, when the public prosecutor of Los Angeles, submitted a petition to ask a court to arouse the brothers. But Mr Gascón, who had entered the office and promised to relax much of the policy of the nineties by concentrating on rehabilitation and fewer penal sentences, lost his re -election offer to Nathan Hochman, a former federal public prosecutor.
Mr. Hochman is a more traditional public prosecutor, emphasizes the rights of victims and takes on a more difficult line for conviction. He came across the resentment of the brothers and said they had not demonstrated “full insight” in their crimes.
In the court, Mr. Geragos called the officers of justice ’90s Neanderthals’. In an interview with NewsNation he said Mr. Hochman “was chosen because the 90s called, and they wanted their da’s office back.”
One of the witnesses that witnessed to support weakness was Jonathan Colby, a retired judge from Florida who collaborated with the brothers in Prison Training puppies to work with injured combat veterans and autistic children. Mr. Colby said that, as a judge who supervised criminal cases in the nineties, he was a judge of the law and order that almost always imposed the most difficult punishment. “Unfortunately I was proud of that,” he said.
He said that his association with the brothers changed ideas about the role of the prison and hoped that if they were released, he could work with them to inform judges about the possibilities of rehabilitation. “I never thought prisons were able, or prisoners were able to rehabilitate themselves,” he said.
After the prisons of California had become so overcrowded in the 1990s, a decision by the American Supreme Court led to reduce its prisoner to a series of legislative reforms, including the resentment that the brothers allowed to reconsider their case in court.
When the brothers said they had killed because they had been sexually abused by their father, public prosecutors and some in the media treated the claims with skepticism. ((During the trial, a public prosecutor said“Men cannot be raped because they miss the necessary equipment to actually be raped.”
“If they were the Menendez sisters, they would not be here,” Mr Geragos said to court, pointing to the brothers who appeared on a screen from prison, with blue jumpsuits.
When Lyle Mendez arrived in the state prison after his conviction in 1996, he said that one of the things that his mind in that dark time strengthens was the number of victims of sexual abuse that sent him letters.
“I got a lot of ridicule in the 90s, but also a lot of support, and many victims who contact us, appreciate that and find their voice through mine,” said Lyle Mendez during a recent podcast interview with TMZ.
Last fall, as attempts to free the brothers, they gathered Momentum after the release of a Netflix series from the producer Ryan Murphy, Gov. Gavin Newsom weighed in and said on his podcast: “I think our parents would remember Manson as an indelible matter. But for us it was OJ and the Mendez brothers, who were so many of the stories of our lives.”
After judge Michael V. Jesic said on Tuesday that he would reduce the penalties of the brothers, so that they immediately qualify for conditional release and that the case was now in the hands of the governor. Governor Newsom has said that he would also consider Clementia.
“Undoubtedly, what Ryan Murphy did with this series, really illuminated things,” Mr. Newsom said on his podcast last year. “I think social media have relieved things. I don’t know about you, but I will tell you, I can’t even tell you how often my children have said online:” Hey, what’s going on with the Mensendez brothers? “
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