Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón has recommended that a judge resentence Lyle and Erik Menendez almost three decades after the brothers were sentenced to life without parole for murdering their parents. The brothers were convicted in 1996 of first-degree murder for the 1989 killings of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez. If a judge approves the recommendation, it would make them eligible for immediate parole.
Gascón said he believed the brothers have “paid their debt to society.” If a parole board agrees, they could soon be released from prison. These extraordinary developments come in the wake of two true crime productions on Netflix: the scripted limited series, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” and the documentary, “The Menendez Brothers.
” Both revivify the defence strategy used in the brothers’ 1994 and 1996 trials that they murdered their parents as a form of self-defence following years of alleged sexual abuse by their father. In these two productions, we see the moral conundrum of so-called “true crime” on full display. That is, whose definition of “true” should viewers rely on when assessing the veracity of a narrative? More often than not, there are two kinds of truth.
There’s what really happened, and the narrative of what happened. This is a reality that I’ve noted as a criminologist and forensic historian and a police detective before that. As a form of historical revisionism, true crime has shown bot.
