LOS ANGELES () — Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón said he plans to decide by the end of the week his position on a possible resentencing of the Menendez brothers.
Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of their parents at their Beverly Hills home in 1989. But the brothers’ defense team for the past year has been urging a resentencing based on what it says is new evidence backing the brothers’ claims to sexual and physical abuse by their parents.
Gascón said he originally intended to formulate a position on the defense arguments by a November hearing. But given the renewed public attention on the case generated by a new Netflix documentary out this month, he is stepping up that timeline.
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He told CNN on Tuesday that prosecutors in his office are highly divided over the defense appeal.
“I have a group of people, including some that were involved in the original trial, that are adamant they should spend the rest of their life in prison and that they were not molested,” Gascón said.
“I have other people in the office that believe actually that they probably were molested and they deserve to have some relief.”
He said there is no question the two brothers murdered their parents. The only issue is whether they deserve some relief from their sentence after three decades.
In addition to the claims about new evidence of abuse, the defense team is also arguing the brothers deserve some relief because of the decades they already have spent in prison and rehabilitation they have undergone.
“I plan to have a decision by the end of this week, which is what I promised when we started getting a lot of inquiries. We had been looking at this case for over a year, by the way.”
How resentencing process could work in Menendez case
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