Berliner Tageszeitung - LA prosecutor says opposes new trial for Menendez brothers

The pair were jailed for life after a blockbuster legal drama in the 1990s detailing the gruesome slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez at the family's luxury Beverly Hills mansion.

But a growing campaign to free the brothers -- given new life by a hit Netflix series -- has tried to open the door to new legal maneuvers that could see them re-tried, have their sentences reduced or even granted clemency.

Prosecutors in Los Angeles had previously appeared receptive, but newly installed District Attorney Nathan Hochman on Friday said he was opposed to any new trial.

"We conclude, in our informal response that the court should deny the current habeas petition by the Menendez brothers," Hochman told reporters, referring to a motion filed by the men's lawyers that would effectively vacate their convictions.

In a highly detailed press conference, Hochman laid out his department's thinking after a review of the 50,000-page case file.

He said his office did not believe the standard for a habeas hearing had been reached, in part because there were doubts over the veracity of evidence the defense was relying on.

Erik, now 54, and Lyle, 57, have spent more than three decades behind bars.

During two trials in the 1990s that gripped America, prosecutors painted their parents' shotgun murders as a cold-hearted bid by the then-young men -- Lyle was 21 and Erik was 18 -- to get their hands on their parents' $14 million fortune.

But their attorneys described the 1989 killings as an act of desperate self-defense by young men subjected to years of sexual abuse and psychological violence at the hands of a tyrannical father and a complicit mother.

The case saw a huge surge of renewed interest last year with the release of the Netflix hit "Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story."

- Clemency -

Hochman on Friday said the men had offered five disparate explanations for the deaths of their parents, ranging from an initial claim that it was a Mafia hit to the self-defense that they ultimately relied on at trial.

The problem, he said, was that even if they had suffered sexual abuse, that did not constitute grounds for self-defense, a point their attorney during the original trials conceded.

Asked whether he believed the men had been abused, he replied: "What I believe is that they testified to that sexual abuse... in great detail.

"I also understand that when it came to any corroborating information about that sexual abuse, it was extremely lacking. In fact... that was their fourth version. In other words, they didn't come out initially and say: 'We killed our parents because our father sexually abused us'."

Hochman said the decision on whether to grant the habeas motion was one for the courts, as would be any decision on a re-sentencing.

The prosecutor's office will issue its opinion on that in the coming weeks, with a court hearing on the issue scheduled for March 20-21.

As for the third route to freedom available to the men: California Governor Gavin Newsom "has the clemency petition on his desk, and he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants," Hochman said.

D. Fjodorow--BTZ