Menendez brothers, guilty of murdering their parents in 1990s, will not get new trial

This Friday, Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman, denied a new trial for brothers Erik and Lyle Menendez, thus closing one of their few avenues to freedom.

Prosecutor Hochman announced his decision at a press conference, 30 years after the Menendez brothers were convicted of murdering their parents Jose Enrique Menendez and Mary Louise Menendez with a shotgun, in one of the most remembered and controversial trials of the 1990s.

During the trial, Erik and Lyle argued that they committed the murders because they feared their parents were going to murder them, showing as evidence a history of sexual, emotional and physical abuse.

At first, the brothers were tried separately, with two different juries and, in both cases, the jurors did not reach unanimous agreement, causing the two trials to be mistried.

Then, in a second trial, the brothers were tried together, and here the judge excluded evidence of abuse from their defense, something that was decisive for Erik and Lyle Menendez to be finally sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

Prosecutors argued that the brothers' motive was to keep their parents' multimillion-dollar inheritance, in a case that regained public attention last year, thanks to the Netflix documentary 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.'

Decades later, the Menendez brothers, backed by a group of 20 family members, asked former district attorney George Gascón to reconsider the case, requesting a new trial based on new evidence alleging they had been abused by their father.

The evidence presented included, for example, a note written by Erik in 1988 detailing the abuse and a statement from a former member of the band Menudo, who claimed he was also a victim of Jose Menendez.

However, Hochman overwhelmingly defeated former prosecutor Gascón, who was open to rehearing the case, and claimed that the new evidence was too weak to proceed with a new trial.

"What I believe is that they testified to that sexual abuse. They absolutely testified to it in great detail. I also understand that when it came to any corroborating information about that sexual abuse, it was extremely lacking," Hochman told reporters. "And the fact that it was their fourth version – in other words, they didn’t come out initially and say, ’We killed our parents because our father sexually abused us. They didn’t go ahead and when they got arrested, tell anyone that."