Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon announced when his office would decide whether or not they would consider a re-sentencing in Erik and Lyle Menendez’s case after the emergence of new evidence. The decision, Gascon said on Tuesday, will come “by the end of the week.”
Erik and Lyle were sentenced to life in prison for murdering their parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in their Beverly Hills mansion in 1989. They have never denied committing the crime in court. Rather, at their first trial, their attorney argued that they killed their parents in self defense out of fear that their parents would kill them if they disclosed years of alleged sexual abuse by their father.
More than three decades later, on Oct. 16, the L.A. District Attorney’s office revealed they were reevaluating the brothers’ infamous parricide, following a legal filing that revealed new alleged details of abuse by José.
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The filing included a letter written by Erik describing his father’s alleged abuse to his cousin prior to the double homicide. And, an additional alleged victim, Roy Rosselló, a former member of Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, also accused José Menendez of abusing him when he was 14-years-old.
The Menendez family continues to publicly support the brothers’ pleas for freedom and their molestation claims, insisting that Lyle and Erik were “failed by the very people who should have protected them” and protecting themselves “the only way they knew how.”
Aside from Gascon’s upcoming re-sentencing decision, the Menendez brothers are next scheduled to return to court on Nov. 26.
