Erik and Lyle Menendez are one step closer to freedom after a judge on Tuesday reduced their sentence and opened up the possibility that the brothers might be granted parole.
The dramatic development comes more than 30 years after they were placed behind bars for the 1989 murder of their parents.
Following a day of testimonies from family members and even a former inmate, Judge Michael V. Jesic of the Los Angeles Superior Court made the landmark ruling, reducing their sentence from life in prison without the possibility of parole to 50 years with the possibility of parole.
Jude Jesic’s resentencing means that Erik and Lyle will now have to appear before the California Parole Board, a panel which includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who will make the final call on whether the brothers will be granted parole.
Erik and Lyle were already slated to appear before the board on June 13 as part of a clemency hearing Newsom announced in March.
“This was an absolutely horrific crime,” Judge Jesic said while delivering his ruling Tuesday, according to The New York Times. “I’m not suggesting they should be released,” he continued. “That’s not for me to decide.”
But, he added: “I do believe they have done enough over the last 35 years to get that chance.”
While Erik and Lyle were not physically present in court, they appeared via livestream Tuesday, where they took ownership of their crime and expressed remorse for the hurt they caused both during the murder and after.
“I killed my mom and dad. I make no excuses and also no justification,” Lyle said in a statement to the court, adding that he made the “choice to reload, return to the den and run up to my mother and shoot her in the head.”
“The impact of my violent actions on my family … is unfathomable,” he continued.
Erik similarly took ownership of the grisly murder and told the court, “I fired all five rounds at my parents and went back to reload. I lied to police. I lied to my family. I’m truly sorry.”
He also noted that he had spent many years thinking about the “terror” his parents “must have felt when their own son fired a gun at them.”
Los Angeles district attorney Nathan J. Hochman has maintained that the brothers did not deserve a resentencing, claiming that they never fully owned up to their crimes and were still lying about their motive.
Erik and Lyle were 18 and 21 respectively when they shot their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, to death in their Beverly Hills home in 1989. They were convicted of first-degree murder in 1996.
Defense attorneys have argued that the brothers were acting out of self-defense that night after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of their father for years. Meanwhile, prosecutors alleged that the brothers killed their parents to access their lucrative inheritance.
Their case has gripped the zeitgeist for decades, and recently found a resurgence through Ryan Murphy’s drama Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.
