Erik Menendez has had time to think long and hard about this decision, and he has chosen Las Vegas as his new home, TMZ reports.
That’s if LA County District Attorney George Gascón decides to seek resentencing for Erik, 53, and his older brother Lyle – a decision he will announce at a press conference at 1:30 p.m. Thursday — and if a judge agrees to downgrade their 1990 convictions from murder to voluntary manslaughter.
The maximum punishment for voluntary manslaughter in California is 11 years, and the brothers have served nearly 35, meaning that they would go free.
Las Vegas is where Erik’s wife, Tammi, lives. The couple married in 1999 after corresponding by mail for six years, when she was married to someone else.
Lyle, 56, married Anna Eriksson in 1996, but they divorced five years later. In 2003, he married his current wife, Rebecca Sneed. Where Lyle wants to live is unknown, according to TMZ. Apparently, he’s not thinking that far ahead.
Murder Was the Case … in 1990
There isn’t any doubt who shot the brothers’ parents, José and Kitty, to death on Aug. 20, 1989 in their Beverly Hills mansion. Erik, who was 18 at the time, and Lyle, 21, confessed to it.
However, what was a clear case of murder in 1990 is murkier in 2024.
The brothers were both sexually molested by their father, a claim backed up by several witnesses at the time and buttressed by a recent claim from a member of Menudo, who claimed that José molested him while working for the boy band’s record label.
When murder charges were first brought against the brothers, their only possible defense was self-defense, which their attorney failed to prove in two trials. But changing societal views toward sexual abuse now insist that it should have been considered a mitigating factor in their sentencing. (The abuse was not even admissible in their second trial, which resulted in their 1996 conviction.)
The case has attracted fresh attention thanks to a recent Netflix documentary on the case and the network’s series “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story.” It has also drawn protests on TikTok from Gen Z, which generally believes that justice was wildly unserved. (For instance, most of the male jurors on the convicting jury didn’t believe that a father could molest his own son and thought the brothers murdered their parents for financial gain.)
The brothers were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for two counts of first-degree murder. They are currently incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.
Prisons in California permit conjugal visits, but not for prisoners serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. Though that law was changed in 2016, neither Erik nor Lyle can receive visits from family members because their crime was a violent offense against a family member.
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