On Friday, the board of directors of the California parole rejected the candidacy of Lyle Menendez, one day after a separate panel refused to release his brother Erik.
The brothers made their first appearances before the commission of parole since their conviction for the murders of their parents’ 1989, Jose and Kitty. A van Nuys judge agreed in May to reduce their sentence to 50 years to perpetuate, which makes them eligible.
The two brothers will have another chance of parole in three years.
Julie Garland, one of the two parole commissioners who heard the case, said that if Lyle Menendez had shown positive signs behind bars, “you still have trouble with anti -social personality traits such as deception, minimization and rupture of rules below this positive surface.”
Garland urged her not to abandon the hope of freeing.
“This denial is not … it’s not the end,” she said. “It’s a way for you to spend time demonstrating, to practice what you preach who you are, who you want to be.”
Addressing the board of directors on Friday, Lyle Menendez apologized for crimes, saying that the decision to resort to violence was only hers and not that of her brother.
“I am deeply sorry for whom I was, for the evil that everyone endured,” said Menendez. “I can never compensate for the evil and the sorrow that I have caused everyone in my family. I’m really sorry for everyone, and I will always be sorry. “
The parole board examines prisoners for “adequacy”, according to whether they constitute a current threat to society. Friday, a large part of the hearing focused on the illicit use of mobile phones by Menendez in the correctional establishment of Richard J. Donovan in San Diego.
Menendez was prevented from going to family for three years after being caught up by a phone in March 2024. As a detainee, he had access to an approved prison iPad, but he said that prison staff had access to his communications and sometimes sold them to tabloids. He said he had used the unlawful mobile phone to stay in touch with his family.
“I convinced myself that it was not a way that hurt anyone else than a rules of the rules,” he said. “I didn’t think it really disrupted prisons management.”
A prison doctor concluded that Menendez presented antisocial features, including law, deception, manipulation and not to accept the consequences.
Prosecutor Ethan Milius, who opposed parole, argued that the file shows that Menendez thinks that “the rules do not apply to him”.
“There is no growth,” said Milius. “It’s just that Lyle seems to be.”
Menendez’s conditional liberation lawyer Heidi Rummel argued that the phone issue had been blown away and that there was no evidence of violence or other crime behind bars.
It also urged the panel to consider the serious effects of sexual abuse on childhood in decision -making.
“This crime was born out of trauma, unresolved trauma, fear, sadistic abuses and cruelty,” she said.
Relatives of Menendez also urged the panel to release it. Their testimony was interrupted when it appeared that Abc News had obtained and broadcast the audio of the hearing on Thursday with Erik Menendez. Rummel argued that the liberation of audio was inappropriate, because relatives did not know that the audio of their testimony would become public. After a significant delay, the hearing resumed with the commissioners promising not to publish the audio of the hearing on Friday without any other procedure.
The Menendez affair reappeared in pop culture with the release of “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”, the successful series Netflix released last year. The series, as well as two documentaries on the case, revealed themselves when the brothers had a request awaiting the Habeas corpus, in which they argued that new evidence justified a new trial.
The DA of the County of Los Angeles at the time, George Gascón, was questioned his position on the motion, which prompted the office to take a new look at the case and finally to look for. At the time, the brothers were overwhelming life penalties without the possibility of parole.
Gascón was deeply defeated during the November 2024 elections. His successor, Nathan Hochman, raised intense objections to the release of the brothers, arguing that their continuous demands of “self-defense” show that they did not take full responsibility for their crimes.
