Watch as Erik and Lyle Menendez appear in court for the first time in 28 years after the shotgun murders of their parents.
A judge will decide today if the discovery of new evidence warrants a re-examination of the brothers’ convictions.
In 1989, the brothers were found guilty of murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez and sentenced to life without parole. Throughout the previous trial, the brothers’ defense attorney argued that the brothers had been facing years of sexual abuse by their father. However, prosecutors denied this allegation and instead accused them of murdering their parents for money.
In the years following their conviction, their lawyers had unsuccessfully been working to appeal the courts’ decision. Until March 2023, a habeas corpus petition was filed asking the judge to consider new evidence that supports the claims of sexual abuse inflicted by their father.
Their story has been dramatized in the 2022 Netflix docuseries ‘Monsters’, in which Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez play Erik and Lyle Menendez.
