👨🏻‍⚖️ Why Were The Menendez Brothers Denied Parole?

Em Gillespie joins Jonesy & Amanda to explain it all!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jersey and Amanda gem Nation.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
The editor of The Daily Oz is m Gillespie, and
she's here with everything.

Speaker 3 (00:07):
Menendez brothers, well, Eric and Lyle are back in the headlines.
The Menendez brothers who, in case you forgot somehow murdered
their parents brutally in nineteen eighty nine in their Beverly
Hills mansion. The case has been back in the media
over the last year because there was a Netflix show
called Monsters that came out last year, a dramatization of

(00:30):
the events, but really kind of brought the story of
these brothers to a whole new generation. And since then
there's been this big legal push to get them out
of jail. And we had these parole hearings over the
weekend and much to the shock of the global community,
I think they were both denied parole. They've been denied
parole for another three years, so they're going to be

(00:53):
in jail for probably at least another three years.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
So how many years does that make that all up? Now?

Speaker 3 (00:58):
It's thirty They went in nineteen ninety three, that was
a hung jury nineteen ninety six, so thirty years they've had. Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Yeah, And the reason that they've up for parole is
that new evidence through this documentary. No one has said
that they didn't murder their parents, but there were validating reasons.
That's what came up in the documentary.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
There were some new evidence, like some letters that emerged
alleging abuse by the parents towards other people. Because there
was always this concern that the boys had lied about
physical abuse, particularly by the father. Then other people came
forward and said they had been abused, and that kind
of strengthened the self defense argument. But we've also heard

(01:39):
a lot over the last year that you know, Eric
and Lyle have really rehabilitated themselves in prison, that they've
been these upstanding kind of members of the community, that
they've been involved in outreach mental health programs, and that
they're real leaders within prison. But we heard through these
parole hearings a bit of a different story that maybe
doesn't paint them in such a positive light. Over the
last thirty years, Eric Menendez in particular, was refused parole

(02:05):
because of frequent rule violations, including drug use and physical altercations.
He's openly admitted to using heroin since being incarcerated. He
was found with tobacco and marijuana in his cell, a
lot of contraband offenses, a lot of mobile phone offenses.
Both of them have been found with mobile phones several

(02:26):
times over the thirty years. Eric was involved in frequent
fights and violent incidents. He was also found with prison
wine and supplies to make prison wine and substance gatherings.
So he held little kind of weed smoking parties in
his prison cell apparently, and this is one of the

(02:46):
standout infractions for me. He was found in abuse of
excessive physical contact during visitation. Cited for intimate contact with
his wife in the prison chapel while his then nine
year old stepdaughter was present. So that's some some misconduct.
There was a visitor assault and some other kind of

(03:08):
other assaults.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
They all blended, so hang on. So we they were
in the church. So he married her outside of it
because he would have been in jail.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
No, they got married afterwards. So yeah, yeah, they became
prison pen pals.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
I suppose because women love that.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Some women love that stuff. They go in jail because
I don't think it works the other way around for men.
Men don't do it so much. For women, well you
probably who are because the woman's always in jail.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yeah, it does end up being the kind of that narrative. Lyle, though,
was also denied parole for lots of conduct and contraband missteps,
persistent self phone violations. He was actually banned from having
family visits for three years because he had so much
cel phone possession, drug involvement. He has gang affiliation. Apparently
in prison he's joined a bunch of gangs. So there's

(03:55):
all these kind of pictures that have been painted in
his hearings of kind of these men who really haven't
rehabilitated themselves during prison, that have been naughty boys, which
goes against the image that their lawyers have been portraying,
which is, you know that they're fully reformed and that
it's time for them to be released. They're both in
their fifties now and they've been in prison since their
early twenties. They were eighteen and twenty one when their

(04:18):
parents were murdered. But yeah, there's this sort of all
this abusive authority that's come to light. Their lawyer, meanwhile,
will shock you to know that he has denounced the
hearings as rigged. He said that the Department of Justice
in the Attorney General's Office have rigged all of this
as a big media show and that they haven't fully
taken in the evidence of their rehabilitation, so the strategy

(04:40):
is to kind of discredit the hearings. There's still the
chance that they'll be released on a clemency appeal by
Californian Governor Gavin Newsom. He could override the decision, but
that looks extremely unlikely now that we have all this
evidence of their behavior over the last thirty years. The
board did recommend that Newsome undergo a one hundred twenty

(05:00):
day legal review, so there'll be a bit of a
kind of inquiry, I suppose, into these findings and their
conduct over the last thirty years, and then there'll be
a final sign off from Gavin Newsom in a few months.
But I'd have to say it's not looking good.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Maybe you should be on the pro on board. They'd
be very naughty boards and they should stay for the
rest of their lives. Thank you em Thanks. M Gillespie,
the editor of The Daily OZ