Los Angeles, California
AP
—
A California judge has rejected a request for a new trial for Erik and Lyle Menendez, shutting down one other doable path to freedom for the brothers who’ve served a long time in jail for killing their parents in 1989 at their Beverly Hills mansion.
The ruling Monday by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William C. Ryan comes simply weeks after the brothers had been denied parole. Ryan denied a May 2023 petition in search of a evaluation of their convictions primarily based on new proof supporting their claims of sexual abuse by their father.
The judge wrote that the new proof that “slightly corroborates” the allegations that the brothers had been sexually abused doesn’t negate the truth that the pair acted with “premeditation and deliberation” once they carried out the killings.
“The evidence alleged here is not so compelling that it would have produced a reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror or supportive of an imperfect self-defense instruction,” the judge wrote.
Mark Geragos, a lawyer for the brothers, wouldn’t instantly touch upon the judge’s ruling.
A panel of two commissioners on August 22 denied Lyle Menendez parole for three years after a daylong listening to. Commissioners famous the older brother nonetheless displayed “anti-social personality traits like deception, minimization and rule-breaking that lie beneath that positive surface.”
Erik Menendez, who’s being held on the identical jail in San Diego, was equally denied parole a day earlier after commissioners decided that his misbehavior in jail made him nonetheless a threat to public security.
The brothers had been sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for fatally capturing their father, Jose Menendez, and mom, Kitty Menendez, of their Beverly Hills mansion nearly precisely 36 years in the past on August 20, 1989. While protection attorneys argued that the brothers acted out of self-defense after years of sexual abuse by their father, prosecutors stated the brothers sought a multimillion-dollar inheritance.
A judge reduced their sentences in May, they usually turned instantly eligible for parole. The parole hearings marked the closest they’ve come to successful freedom since their convictions nearly 30 years in the past.