Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway
Murders Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm
Bill Thomas, and we're joined again today by Matt Murphy. Matt,
welcome back to Mind over Murder, and thank you so
much for joining us again.
Speaker 5: Happy to be here.
Speaker 4: So you joined us last time to talk about your
newly published memoir, The Book of Murder, and we've actually
had a number of listeners who said they bought it
on our recommendation, so I love it. We're really pleased
by that.
Speaker 2: Hopefully I'm a massive spike in sales as a result
of appearing on Mind over Murder.
Speaker 5: I'll think I'll take you any spike I.
Speaker 4: Can get, so during your interview, we also spoke about
the TV series Monster, the Menendez Brothers and hard on
the heels of that. It was announced on October twenty
fourth that George Gascon would recommend re sentencing the Menendez
brothers considering the sexual abuse allegations that came to light.
So we wanted to have you back on to talk
about the Menendez case and the resentencing unit.
Speaker 5: Again, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 4: For anybody who is not familiar with the Menendez case,
can you give us the outlines for anyone who maybe
just wasn't paying attention back in the eighties, or actually,
is probably possible some of our listeners may not even
have been born back in the late eighties.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this was so, this was a.
Speaker 6: Very sensational case happening in nineteen eighty nine to very
wealthy young men. Lyle and Eric Menendez called nine one
one and reported that they'd come home from a movie
and their mother and father had been murdered, and they
walked in and found this errifict murder scene, and it
was very dramatic.
Speaker 5: They were crying.
Speaker 6: Lyle was banging his head against a tree outside the house.
It was very high drama, a lot of tears, a
lot of crying. They were raised really in the lap
of luxury, both of them. The family estate was worth
about fifteen million dollars back in nineteen ninety dollars, which is,
I don't know, it's plenty of money. And I had
this beautiful palatial home on Elm Street and the city
of Beverly Hills where I actually had one of my
best friends growing up lived on that street, so I'm
very familiar.
Speaker 5: With the area. This is Beverly Hills.
Speaker 6: This is like what you think of when you think
of the mansions and if you had all the money
in the world, where you would move into. Lyle and
Eric had objectively at least these very idyllic, high dollar lives.
Their father, Jose was from Cuba originally, and he was
a driven guy. He was a music industry executive by
all accounts. He was a tough dad, like he really
drove his sons very hard. And Eric was was basically
a professional tennis player, and Lyle was in college and
this horrific event happened, And about four.
Speaker 5: Days after the murder, Lyle.
Speaker 6: And Eric went on a lavish spending spree, which caught
the attention of the detectives that work in the case.
They were they were so emotional at the time that
I don't think they even did any what was called
GSR testing, or which is don his gunshot resdue to
test them. I don't think they did so. Anyway, they
went on a spending spree. Eric hired a full time
tennis coach, like a like an eight hours a day
kind of guy that's very expensive. They bought a Porsche,
They bought a bunch of watches, and it was just
this very prolific spending spree. They Lyle purchased our restaurant
franchise bodyguards to go with them everywhere. Was very surprising
to a lot of the detectives. During the time, they
started seeing a psychologist named doctor Ozil. During one of
these sessions, I think it started with Eric. He confessed
that he in fact had murdered his parents, and then
Lyle also came in. On some of these sessions, doctor
Oziel began fearing for his life thinking that Lyle may
murder him because he knew about this secret. And it
turns out that he had tape recorded these sessions and
he instructed his I don't know if she would be
called a mistress girlfriend. I don't know what the correct
term would be, because we're referring to nineteen nine to
me who's he had a romantic relationship with a woman
who went public and after they had a kind of
a nasty breakup, and said Lyle and Eric Menendez confessed
these murders to my boyfriend who was afraid that they
were going to kill him and he needs to know.
Speaker 5: So that really kicked it off. And there's a thing called.
Speaker 6: Tarosoft people versus Tearosoft that allows the therapist patient village
to be breached when there is a credible threat of
death or great.
Speaker 5: Bodily harm to somebody. In this case, it was the doctor.
Speaker 6: So they hired Leslie Adwerge sentity is a very capable,
very famous defense lawyer. And for the very first time
we start hearing allegations of sexual abuse by Jose Menendez.
They never mentioned that to doctor Ozil, which a lot
of the detectives and a lot of the prosecutors still
at the La County DA's office, and a lot of people,
frankly have a big problem with they're in there. They're
comfortable enough to confess the murder of their parents, and
the reason they gave them was that their father they
killed the mother because it was a mercy killing because
the father had been having a series of affairs. And
then once the defense comes in, then it becomes what
they were being sexually abused, and then it turns into
they ran what's called imperfect self defense, which is an
actual but unreasonable belief, and they needed to defend yourself.
And then they investigation reveal that they purchased shotguns using
a fake ID, fake IDs down in San Diego, that
they brought him up, and Eric and Lyle both lied
repeatedly to investigators, not just about the sexual assault, but
about how they got the shotguns. They lied to investigators,
and then they actually lied in court as well, and
Eric was caught in numerous lives by the old prosecutor
gun named Western Curriyama that it was met with great
fanfare in the media back in the day. They each
had a it was one trial with each other on jury.
The juries hung. They ran with this sexual abuse defense.
It was a controversial ruling by the court at the
time to actually even let that end, because of course
their parents were sitting on a couch watching TV and
their mom weighed one hundred and ten pounds, and based
on the forensics, they were able to establish that after
going with soun as Winchester, which is shooting all of
the ammunition and both shotguns and these were twelve gage
mosspur and shotguns that Lyle actually went outside of the
car and reloaded because somehow miraculously his mother was still
alive and he put the gun to her cheek and
quite literally blew or face off, and that's the police
were then they called nine one one and said we
came home from this movie and the lives began basically,
so to run a self defense claim on that was
legally controversial at the time.
Speaker 5: Because it's those pretty tough facts.
Speaker 6: To claim that you were an imminent fear of your life,
actual but unreasonable belief in the need to defend yourself
is typically like you you're in a traffic dispute and
some guy gets out of the car and you think
he might have a gun, but you don't see anything
so you shoot him first. You know, like that that
might be an imperfect self defense, but imperfect self defense is,
you know it is. It's a difficult threshold to meet.
So the first trials hung. They hung based on the
women and the men. It hung down gender lines, And
they got new prosecutors for the second trial, and it
was tried in front of the same judge who after
the controversy allowing this imperfect self defense when there truly was.
It's very difficult to meet the legal threshold of admiscibility
for that new prosecutor again, Nam David Cohn, who I
actually knew pretty well. He's a career prosecutor, is a
very good traveler, and he was a fundamentally fair guy.
He argued successfully that imperfect self defense should not apply
to these facts because both victims were helpless at the time,
and the idea of a legal concept that goes back
thousands of years, that anticipatory self defense is not a defense.
In other words, you can't say, hey, my neighbor that
I've had this dispute with, I was worried the next
Christmas he might kill me, so I went over there
and murdered him first. That doesn't work as a defense
as and for obvious reasons, it hasn't in pretty much
any legal system. So the second trial, the judge precluded
that as a defense. And what was interesting is that
during the this was a huge sensational case. During that time,
Laomanendez picked up a groupie a woman who was visiting
him in the jail, and she secretly recorded him bragging
about how well he had lied during the first trial.
They were both convicted. The California Supreme Court affirmed their conviction.
Then it went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. Now,
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal is a federal court
that is anything but a rubber stamp for the prosecution.
It's commonly understood to be the most liberal federal district
court in the country, has been for many decades. They
wrote an absolutely biting opinion excoriating the defense at the
prospect that this could have been imperfect self defense, that
this was a proper ruling by the court. And so
this case achieved the highest level of the pellet scrutiny
by a very skeptical, no nonsense, serious group of judges
at both the California and Supreme Court level, and also
the Ninth Circuit the federal level, so they were sent
to lifestile possibility parole because murder for financial gain in
the state of California first murdered with the special circuit
financial gain.
Speaker 5: Is lifetile possibility parole or straight probation. Those are essentially
the sensing options for the court.
Speaker 6: They've been imprisoned for thirty five years and one of
the family members and the family is split on this.
There's a lot of talk and chatter saying the family
quote unquote wants them out. That's just not true. There
are members of the family who've been very supportive of
the boys and they're not boys men. And there are
family members like Kitty's brother Milton, who is adamantly opposed
to them getting out or being resentenced. So the family
is a mix of opinions on this. But a family
member who's supportive turned up with the letter purportedly written.
It's an undated letter purportedly written to Eric's cousin by
Eric Menandez saying and there was a line in there
essentially saying he's so fat now referring to Jose when
he comes in here, you don't know how about it
is so it's vague, but they're saying this corroborates the
allegations of sexual abuse.
Speaker 5: Arguably it would.
Speaker 6: The problem is it was written by Eric Menandez. He
knew about it back then at the time. This isn't
This isn't exculpatory evidence. This would be considered mitigating, and
a lot of people don't understand the difference between the two.
Mitigating evidence means that you did it, but there's something
to be considered during sentencing. Exculpatory means you didn't do
it in the most basic terms, and sculptory evidence would
be as my buddy Larry Yellen, who's now a Superior
Court judge, was in homicide with me. He would explain
it as sculpatory evidence means you're in Vegas sitting next
to an Elvis impersonator drinking a Pina colada on casino
video at the time the crime is committed, so that's exculpatory.
This would be more what was the case actually worth
if they were in fact victims of sexual abuse, and
by all accounts, Jose Menendez was very domineering, disciplinaryan a father.
A few days ago we had a big announcement from
George gascon who's the DA of LA that he is
recommending that they be resentenced based on this information. And
also there was a young man back in the day
now he's a middle aged man who's in the Van
Menudo who also recently came forward and said that Jose
Menendez had also sexually used him as well.
Speaker 5: So that's the run down of the case.
Speaker 6: I hope that wasn't too much of a too much
of a ramble, but that's a breakdown. Oh and I'm sorry.
Most important part, there have been a couple of Netflix
the one purported to be a documentary and one is
a dramatized version that really accepts the contentions made by
Lyle and Eric regarding their purported sexual abuse, and it
dramatizes that and it portrays that in very stark and
shocking terms. And then there's so there's been this big
online movement to have them released, which has been championed,
probably most notably by Kim Kardashian.
Speaker 2: As you said to us off the air, noted legal
expert Kim Kardashian.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I just I keep trying to figure out
where she fits in the appellate process in the state
of California because I have so many. I've put a
lot of people in state prison for murder and also
rape and also child molested, and I got dozens of
lifers up there. And I just I wonder when she
gets to make her ruling on my cases. Is it
before the Supreme Court.
Speaker 5: Of California or after the Ninth Circuit.
Speaker 6: I'm just I'm exactly sure where she weighs in on
all my cases. I'd like to prepare all my victims'
families for her opinion on that.
Speaker 2: I sent some cynicism regarding your Yeah.
Speaker 5: I can't.
Speaker 6: I think that's actually my tenth grade vocal word is
that is sardonic. I'm being sartonic, which I believe means
bitterly sarcastic.
Speaker 2: So, just to review, the Menendez brothers actually were put
on trial twice. You mentioned a hung jury. But for
the benefit of our listeners who might not be legal
experts or don't watch as much true crime as Kristin
Dilly and Bill Thomas do, what's a hung jury? And
then once a hung jury happens, what happens after that?
Speaker 6: Sure, in order to be convicted of any criminal offense
in the United States, you need you need a unanimous
jury as it should be, and that's a constitutional right
world guaranteed as Americans, and if your accuse of something,
members of the community must be unanimous as represented by
the jury. Sometimes when this happens, you'll get a jury
that sometimes it's one juror sometimes it's more than one,
but you'll get a jury that cannot agree, and then
the court has to declare what's known as a mistrial,
and essentially you go back to day one of the trial.
You have to bring in a new jury, not immediately usually,
but at some point you will retry that person's that
goes with the territory.
Speaker 5: If you try enough or.
Speaker 6: Prosecute enough cases, you'll always have everybody has a few
that hang where the jury can't make a decision. A
lot of times they will hang between degrees between a
first murder or second of your murder, or between a
second of your murder and a voluntary manslaughter. And in
this one, I think they couldn't. They just couldn't reach
a verdict on the very first question that was first murdered,
so each one and it's this is actually an interesting
procedural vehicle.
Speaker 5: Because it's rare.
Speaker 6: Because the brothers had potentially divergent interests because Lyle apparently
had made doctor Oziel felt that Lyle was threatening and
intimidating him. They each got their own jury, so they
had some divergent defenses. And we wouldn't want out of
fairness to airic Menandez or a code defendant. You don't
want evidence to be admitted that makes your client look
so bad that so there are you can't apply that
to both. So really there's certain rare circumstances where you
want to try code defendants each with their own jury
because they're going to be asked to decide different legal
and factual questions even though they're joined in their co
defendants in the case. So that was something done in
an abundance of caution by the trial judge to do
everything you could to ensure the fairness of the process
against them.
Speaker 2: So in a trial, typically you have a jury of
twelve people and their alternates if someone gets sick, etc.
Speaker 6: So it's to yell so yeah, yeah, And in a
case like that, you'd have probably this thing went on
for a long time, so you probably have five or
six alternates, so it's never just twelve, Which is funny
because some of the old architects who designed the courthouses
in Orange County didn't know that. And we actually have
a North Justice Center and foot and some architect and
nobody in the county ever looked over your shoulder, just
designed every jury box in the building with twelve seats.
So every jury trial you do, you have to bring
in folding chairs for the extra jurors to sit in.
And it was comical, but yeah, so you always have
alternates in a case like that. You always have at
least three or four people in case somebody gets sick,
or get some a car accident, or decides they can't
be fair.
Speaker 2: Right, and the alternates have to hear all of the
testimony because if they step in, even though you're an alternate,
you're still spending all the same amount of time and
listening to all of the testimony, which could go weeks
or even months.
Speaker 5: We had a great judge.
Speaker 6: You used to describe it to perspective jerors as you folks,
or it's like being invited to the banquet and you
don't get to eat.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so they sit there there a juror.
Speaker 6: In every respect, and then they are available in case
there's an issue, if a jury commits misconduct or can't.
A lot of times it will happen during trial. Somebody
will get they'll get sick, they'll get in a car accident,
all have a family member whether that has an issue,
something will blow up and they have to be excused
from jury duty, and then you just fill in an
alternate with that. And that's also very common on long trials,
and a lot of murder.
Speaker 5: Cases, especially with the complexity of these.
Speaker 6: Tend to take a while, so you need to make
sure you have alternates lined up.
Speaker 2: And so in this example, you actually have the same
information testimony being presented with two juries in two different bodies.
Speaker 5: Yep, that's right. So you have about probably about thirty people.
Speaker 6: I don't know how many they actually impaneled on that,
but yeah, it's andy. Maybe they have one in LA.
We didn't have one in an Orange County. There's no
courtroom designed to accommodate two juries. So typically what will
happen is the section off a part of the gallery
for the jury to watch from the gallery. And I
don't know, I don't know how they did that in
that original trial, whether they were suiting the gallery or
how they accommodated that, but there were two juries, and
it's rare. It's rare, but again that's something that the
judge did to ensure fairness to both codefendants.
Speaker 5: That's the idea, yea.
Speaker 2: In the minute as example, because I think this becomes important.
There was a hung jury. They couldn't agree. Ultimately, they
go back to the judge and say we're deadlocked. We
cannot come up with a unanimous verdict, right, and then
they start all over again. As you mentioned, Matt, so
there were two juries, and then they started all over again,
and so there's a whole second trial, right, So.
Speaker 6: We had an expression for that, having to retry case.
They just call it it's like putting on a wet
bathing suit, because it's you got to go through the
whole thing again. And then if you got to try
a case three times, it's putting on a wet sandy
baiting suit. No, no prosecutor ever wants to try a
case twice. So actually, and it's interesting, there were the
two prosecutors originally on an Endez were replaced by a
really steely eyed, hard hitting career prosecutor named David Kahn
who knew his business and I did cases with him.
I knew him reasonably well, and he was that guy
was the real deal. So he came in and he
prosecuted the second case in front of the same judge.
And look, every trial is new, and so he especially
having heard all the evidence in the first trial, and
how essentially they weren't able, in the view of the
court to establish any actual fear of imminent and it
has to be imminent. There were no fear of imminent
danger from jose who is sitting on my couch watching TV.
And certainly none from there. I don't know how old
she was, say sixty year old, one hundred pound mother
that once. I think there were one of the I
think they called either fifty four or sixty four defense
witnesses in the first trial. So the court listened to
all that, and Cone came in, having reviewed that the
entire record on that, saying this does not meet the
threshold of imperfect self defense. You can't get there from here.
There's no raptional argument that they were actually in imminent fear.
We understand the court allowed about the first time. But
here was what they actually produced. If you look at
it in the form of what's called an offer of proof,
like what we're going to prove. They didn't prove it,
and they called all these people who threw a bunch
of mud at the victims, but they failed to stablish
the legal threshold. And it's important to remember the law
is the law for everybody. Our system is based on
a thing called starry decisives, which essentially is Latin for
what has come before. Essentially and in civil law, which
is the way they do it in the majority of
the world. It's and not speaking to used with like
civil proceedings here in the United States, but they call
it civil laaror Napoleonic codes, where it is based on
essentially everything is written by a legislature, so which rules,
and it's written rules that somebody sat down and sharing wrote.
The strength of our system is ours is different. Ours
is based on real people, going back hundreds of years,
in real scenarios with real human beings, where these great
philosophical questions of what is fair, what is just?
Speaker 5: What is the best way to do it?
Speaker 6: That legal concept will survive over time and be improved
upon over the years. So it's real people, real events,
and it's wisdom of real judges making good decisions. That's
what our law is based on. And then we also have,
of course legislative stuff as well, but that's the way
our trials are supposed to work. So when you're talking
about imperfect self defense, when we start allowing people to
say it wasn't actual self defense when my parents, who
really mean to me, or my dad was my dad
allegedly sexually abused me years before or even last night,
and so I decided to kill him, even though at
that moment there's nothing imminent, and even though I planned
this murder out, and even though I went on a spending.
Speaker 5: Speed right after.
Speaker 6: There are legal thresholds that have been that have withstood
the test of time concerning this concept of imperfect self defense.
And again in the case of Menendez brothers, this was
a huge case back in the day as it is
now here we are talking about it, and this was
something that which stood the most skeptical, highest level of
pellet scrutiny that you can experience in the Western United States,
and that's the California Spree Court and then the Ninth Circuit,
and they upheld the court's ruling based on these facts.
Speaker 4: I want to get into why we're at the resentencing
question right now because I think it's particularly interesting that
the timing on this, As you had mentioned before, we
do have two media presentations, one as a documentary, the
other is fictionalized. And then we're also right ahead of
as you told Bill and if there a rather contentious
election in Los Angeles. Before we get into those sort
of mitigating factors here, we do want to talk about
the Resentencing Unit and why it was ultimately established. I
was taking a look at the DA's website and it
said that the Resentencing Unit was established in twenty twenty
one to address over incarceration through contemporary laws and policy.
Can you unlegalize that for us? What does that mean?
What is the Recenency Unit aim to do? And why
are we seeing Eric and Lyle brought up in front
of it now?
Speaker 6: Okay, George Gascone was the former DA of San Francisco,
and for anybody who's been to San Francisco lately, there
are a lot of people in that city, a lot
of law enforcement who blame the current state of San
Francisco on George Gascone and his philosophy of not punishing people. Essentially,
he came in with the opposite of a thing called
the broken windows policy of New York that came in
under Rudy Giuliani in the nineteen eighties, where they decided
that they were going to start enforcing fines for things
like broken windows, which is where it comes from. Like
with the idea of improving the quality of life for
New Yorkers.
Speaker 5: They were going to try to clean up the city.
Speaker 6: The opposite of that is essentially everybody's a victim, no
cash bail, and we should rehabilitate everybody instead of actually
using custodial sentences as a method of criminal law enforcements.
So those are the two diametric opposite opposites philosophically, and
so after George Gascone was no longer the DA of
San Francisco, right after the summer of George Floyd, he
ran for DA. He challenged a friend of mine, her
name was Jackie Lacy. I thought she was a great DA.
A lot of people did her office really liked working
for her. He challenged her, basically attacking her largely for
some police officer involved shootings that these officers were cleared.
But there was a lot of activism at the time,
and they let George Gascone run with the ballot designation
of Criminal Justice Reformer, and we all remember that crazy
summer and he was elected the DA. In his very
first day in office, he came in with sweeping edicts.
His nickname among a lot of law enforcement in southern
California as Captain Freedom. So among the edicts that he
came in with were his very first day, he announced
that he was no longer going to allow his proskers
to attend what are called BPT life for hearing. That's
the border prison term life for hearings. So essentially, with
some exceptions, the three categories of life prisoners in the
state of California are rapists, child molesters, and murderers. Those
are basically the cases for which you can get a
life sentence. There's a few three strikers that were very
violent that were struck out, and then there's a there
are a very few kidnapper kidnappings that result in great
Bottle Andrew, but by and large, ninety five percent plus
are either going to be doing life for murder, rape,
or child lust. Okay, so his very first day he
announced that they would not oppose.
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Speaker 6: In other words, what happens whenever a life prisoner comes up.
If somebody gets twenty five years to life, they come
up for parole under current law at around less than
twenty years, so if.
Speaker 5: They'll get a prole hearing.
Speaker 6: The way that works, and this is a part of
my job in the homicide unit for seventeen years, you
actually send a representative of the office, a professional prosecutor
with the file to sit in the room and do
these bpt live for hearings. So when the guy comes
in for his parole hearing, it says I'm totally innocent,
I didn't do it, or it's not the way they said,
And a lot of times their stories will morph over
twenty years, and you've got a professional there to go
actually that's not true. He tied her up, he raped
her first. You know, you've got somebody there with the
file to oppose it. So the board has the best
information available and they actually have an advocate in the room.
And look, sometimes I've gone on those where I thought
the guy really served his debt. There'd be like some
of those old gangsters that are involved in a drive
by when they're eighteen, they didn't fire the gun, especially
if they program and they're in there and they express
genuine remorse and they're out of the gang personally, And
this is my personal opinion. I never had any problem
with those guys getting out. But when it comes to
the guys like the sexual predators or the ones who
murder innocent people or murder people from money, which is
what the Menandez brothers were convicted of, yet they those
have a different flavor tone and Gascon across the board
as a sweeping edict refusal lets prosecutions attend and oppose
any of those. The voters of Los Angeles County don't
know that it's an outrageous thing. It's the I'm telling you,
the worst thing for public safety imaginable. And these guys,
one of the points of hypocrisy of that is that
they don't get paroled. I live in Manhattan Beach. Then
they get parolled in my little nice neighborhood. They get
parolled to the same neighborhoods that people like George Gascon
profess to care so much about. And those poor people
are the ones that are victimized next by these guys.
Imagine the biggest bully for your listener, now multiplied by
about ten. That's pretty much what it takes to get
a life prison, a life sentence in California State prison.
You really have to work to get that. It is
not an easy thing. There's a lot of myths about
three strikes out there, but you've got to earn that.
And if you're a VPT lifer and you go up
some of those guys, I totally agree, I have served
their debt. Most of them haven't, especially the sex vendors.
So guessco and came in with that. He also he
refused to very first day he said, we're not going
to apply strikes anymore. Having been a prosecutor for twenty
six years. Strikes are it's a widely misunderstood law. It
allows judges on the worst of the worst to double
sentences and to make sure And what actually the effect
of three strikes practically is it unclogged a lot of
the court system because these guys would plead guilty to
reasonable offers so that they and they wouldn't clog up
the system because the risk of taking it to trial
was too high. Another thing he did is he struck
called gang enhancements. There's a thing called one to eighty six,
which is the California Street Terroism Act. We have an
active gangsterer victimizing the innocent people in his community. That
was an enhancement that you could put in there. So
if he was robbing people with the benefit for the
benefit of the gang, or claiming the gang as he
did it to intimidate witnesses, that was an additional enhancement.
All of those were wiped out under George Gascon. So
he came in. He is a very he's a hard
left and I want to Empha says this. I am
not a political guy. I don't belong to any political party.
My book is completely a political from a public safety standpoint.
That was, in my view, a slap in the face
the innocent members, the hard working members of those a
lot of those communities with these guys we get paroled
to and it's a real shame. So what happened was
there have been two recall campaigns. My fellow Angelina's and
I grew up in this city woke up to what
a nightmare George Gascone was. Now Baddie was for public safety.
This guy is he's never prosecuted a single case in
his life. As far as I know, he's never actually
tried a case. He's an administrative figurehead for the hard
left in California, and he's been a disaster for public
safety in the city of Los Angeles. And he was
thirty points down in the last polling done by the
Los Angeles Times. Again, no schilfeur, the prosecution or the police.
Los Angeles Times thirty points down. So the Menendez habeas petition.
In other words, habeas means new evidence has been discovered,
and we all have to be open minded, especially as prosecutors.
But if new evidence comes to light that may show
that somebody didn't do it, boy, that's a really important
thing and that needs to be addressed immediately. The abeas
was submitted to George Gascone eighteen months ago with the
same thing, the letter purportedly written by Eric and the
Menudo guy. So that's been sitting on his stats for
eighteen months, and now on the eve of the election,
we are days away and he's thirty points down and
a lot of people in his office, not me. I
don't know what's in his head, so I can't really
say but a lot of the prosecutors in his office
believe that is a cynical attempt to garner gen Z
votes by waiting and doing this on the eve of
the election. He was always going to do this. The
question is why did he wait so long? George Gascon
in the view of many of his prosecutors, again not me,
because I've never actually spoken to the guy that they
think he's never met a freaking criminally didn't like. So
he's one of those He's one of those activist das,
So he was always going to recommend that they be resentenced.
But if it's so compelling, as the argument goes by others,
why did he wait eighteen months and do this literally,
really George single digits away from the election.
Speaker 5: A lot of people think.
Speaker 6: That is it's a gross political attempt to garner some
votes on an election that, hopefully for me personally and
everybody I know in LA an election that he loses
and loses badly.
Speaker 2: A lot of our listeners have responded. We put out
a notice saying, hey, do you have questions for Matt
Murphy veteran prosecutor regarding them Menendez case, and if you
don't mind, we'd like to jump into some of these questions.
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Let's start off with Jessica asks, can Ma explain for
those of us not well versed in the legal system,
what their sentences were in the first place, how did
the jury come to the guilty and conclusion, and how
his social media been able to influence this case so quickly.
Speaker 6: Great questions, all of them to Jessica. So, number one,
the way they were convicted, we went through that a
little bit. The evidence was overwhelming. They actually shot their parents,
and they went on a spending spree. So the question
then became, at the time they did it, did they
believe that they were in fear of death, of great
bodily harm. They bought the shotguns two days before, they
literally went out and reloaded. And Eric was eighteen at
the time, and I believe Lyle was twenty maybe twenty one.
But these are two strapping young guys, one of them
is a professional athlete, and the jury didn't believe that
they were in a position where they feared for their
life from their one hundred pound mom, especially when they
were armed with the most devastating close quartered combat weapon
ever invented by man. So they believed that and look,
it's also important for Jessica and the other listeners to
understand the way the law works is and again this
goes back a couple thousand years. It is the concept
that one hundred percent makes a hole, okay, And why
do I say that when it comes to murders for
financial gain and I have prosecuted many of them.
Speaker 5: Works is you will often have mixed motives in a murder.
If you have a.
Speaker 6: Dispute with your neighbor. You might hate the color of
his car, and you have a dispute over the fence,
and maybe his son wants to date your daughter. There
can be all kinds of reasons. Or maybe a better
example would be a child moluster may kidnap a child
who wants to ransom the child and molest the child.
So there can you can have mixed motives in a murder.
And in fact, it's very rare that anyboy will have
a pure one reason to commit a murder. Usually there's
multiple reasons. And the way it works for financial gain
one hundred percent being a hole is if.
Speaker 5: You are motivated at all at all by.
Speaker 6: Financial gain, you can be motivated ninety nine percent nine
nine percent.
Speaker 5: It doesn't equal a hole.
Speaker 6: You can be motivated to ninety nine percent by let's
hold our noses and say everything is true that Jose
Menendez was molesting these guys. It was horrible, but if
there's just a little bit of that motivation was for
financial gain in the state of California under the law,
that is that satisfies every element for first three murder
plus murder for financial gain, and their behavior and the
spending spree and the watches and the Porsche's and all
that stuff certainly was evidence in support of that as
a theory. So that's number one. Second part of that was,
I believe how does the resentencing work?
Speaker 5: I believe it was.
Speaker 4: The second part was how did the jury come to
their guilty conclusion?
Speaker 5: Ultimately, so they're.
Speaker 6: Finally that's how it's based on that evidence. And then
the second part of the question was.
Speaker 4: How has social media been able to influence this moving
through the DA's office so quickly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so this is and that's one of the things
that's out there that's really ironic that it hasn't.
Speaker 5: Moved through the DA's office quickly.
Speaker 6: It's been sitting on Guest Goon's desk for eighteen months.
The behavious technically is different than this latest pitch, but
he's had this information for over a year and a half.
But the influence of social media, these Netflix specials, everybody has,
It's garnered a bunch of attention. The way that this
case was portrayed on Netflix, which was highly dramatized based
solely on the word of Lyle and Eric, who were
again repeat heatedly proven to be untruthful to various people,
pretty much everybody about pretty much everything from the nine
to one operator, to the first responders, to the first
cops on scene, the first detectives, to the juries, and
to the court multiple times for multiple reasons. Capped off
by Lyle bragging about how he lied in the first
trial on tape, which is why he didn't testify in
the second trial. All of that kind of led to
their conviction. This social media push, championed by Kim Kardashian,
led to a lot of media on this and George
Gascon's big announcement that they are recommending that they be resenten.
Now it's important to point out court doesn't have to
accept that recommendation. The court doesn't have to do that,
And I don't know this judge, but there is so
much it's almost I heard a friend of mine in
the leda's office who's a career prosecutor, described it to
me as a reverse lynch mop. We don't do mob
justice in the United States for a reason. We have
courts for a reason, we have juries for a reason.
When you have somebody that wants to lynch somebody, like
why it are defending the accused horse thief. I think
it was famously with the Shatgo when he came out
and said that can be no lynchings. I'm going to
protect this guy. This is the reverse in the view
of many of the career prosecutors there. This is a
bunch of people who don't know very much about the case,
what actually happened. They watched a special and they think
that correctly.
Speaker 5: I think it's motivated largely by good.
Speaker 6: A lot of people believe what they saw in this
fictionalized TV show, and so they people are rightly offended
by sexual abuse, and they think that somebody who's truly
been sexually abused that's a mitigating factor and that they
should be released. A lot of other people believe they've
thirty five years is enough time, which is a separate issue.
So there's a lot of I think very well meeting
people out there who watch this show and if rallied.
But again, there's a reason why we have judges and juries.
There's a reason why we don't do mob justice in America,
and we shouldn't do mob justice for releasing people because
there are truly unseen consequences here that a lot of
people don't know and don't understand, this movement to abolish
life without possibility to parle as a sentence, and this
is going to about to be a poster case for that.
Speaker 4: So Elizabeth, who notes that she is also an attorney,
wants to know two things. She says, Number one, in
Matt's opinion, could this set a dangerous precedent for future cases?
She thinks it does, And she also asks does Matt
think the resentencing is a slap in the face to
the original jury?
Speaker 5: Wow?
Speaker 6: Those are two fantastic questions, Elizabeth, and thank you for
asking that. And the answer again going back to that story,
decisis things that which has come before?
Speaker 5: Yes? One percent.
Speaker 6: This sets a very dangerous presson and it's important for
people to understand, especially the gen Zers who maybe listening
note this comes from a good place. I totally understand
that it comes from a good place. Part of the
narrative out there is this kind of myth that nobody
understood that men could be victims of sexual assault back then,
as if this was one hundred and fifty years ago.
I worked in the sexual assault unit in the nineteen nineties,
and I can tell you there were times where over
half my case that involved male children. So that was
something that was very well understood back in the day.
And it's this whole thing that like, oh, it's only
rejective because people didn't believe that men could be the
victims of sexual assault.
Speaker 5: It's just preposterous. Okay.
Speaker 6: So this sets a horribly dangerous precedent because the people
who are doing life without possibility of parole in the
state of California are the worst of the worst. These
are people that a lot of times LWOP is given
as an alternative to the death penalty I set on
our Death Penalty Review Committee, we only sought death in
less than four percent of the cases that qualified. So
it has to be a murder, and it has to
be one of the very small but or under special
circumstance murders like kidnapping for rape, kidnapping for ransom committed
during the course of a rape, like murders committed during
the worst of the worst crimes. Those are crimes that
are eligible for life without possibility of parole. A robber
who goes into seven eleven and kills the poor clerk,
those are the elwop offenses. Also, people that are doing
life in prison. I can't emsize it strongly enough. Rapists
and child monsters with multiple victims, and even a straight rape,
just a forcible sexual intercourse accomplished by force and fear
is not a life case. In the state of California,
the life are are the ones that stick the gun
in the woman's face, that put the knife to her throat,
that break in the middle of the night, that for
sodomy and tie up their husband and make and watch.
Speaker 5: It is the worst of the worst.
Speaker 6: Those guys exist, they're in the world, and every one
of them is paying attention to this. And there's this
entire movement in the state of California by people like
George Gascone and his ideological comrades who believe that life
is barbaric and everybody deserves the second chance. And I'm
here to tell you, after twenty one years of doing
sex crimes, of prosecuting sess crimes, there is no fixing
sexual predators. That you cannot fix them. Once they get out,
they're going to keep doing it. A friend who said
they're possessed by the green worms in their brain.
Speaker 5: Is how he put it.
Speaker 6: They will continue to do it or be a risk
of doing it once they've crossed the rubicon into actually
victimizing human beings. And this is a lesson we learned
over and over again. This is the paly Claus case
with Richard Allen Davis. This was this was Rodney ol
call it. Rodney alcala at the dating game. Killer was
one of mine. Anna Kendrick has a movie out called
Woman of the Hour. Every one of your listeners watched
that movie. And I write a whole chapter in my
book on Rodney all call it. He was caught for
the kidnapping and rap of an eight year old girl
named Telly Shapiro.
Speaker 5: In nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 6: He was captured after fleeing to New York. He was
brought back, he was prosecuted, He got a life sentence,
and the pro board released him. In thirty four months,
and guys, he went on to murder one hundred people
at least. And that is what people like George Gascon
believing everybody deserves.
Speaker 5: A second chance.
Speaker 6: Sorry, can I swear that's bullshit? That is a is
you talked about a slap in the face, which is
one of the things. Sorry to rant here you, guys,
I promised you I wasn't going to ramp. This drives
me crazy, all of these people that watch this Netflix
show that believe that sexual assault is wrong, that are
motivated by that one hundred percent. I've dedicated my professional
life to representing victims of sexual assault that for both
in the sexual assault unit and in homicide, in their families,
and in my private practice, I do pro bano work
representing adult women who've been the victims of sexual assault,
and I.
Speaker 5: Do that for free.
Speaker 6: Okay, I have dedicated my professional life to this, and
I'm telling you, the people that will benefit most from
this as far as setting a dangerous precedent are the
rapists and child monsters that are serving life in California
State prison. And if we eliminate life without possibility of parole,
it is absolutely it is not only a slap in
the face to the jury that followed the law here.
I wish my friend David Kahn was still alive because
he would be such a fierce advocate against this because
as the original prosecutor. But it is a slap in
the face to every victim of sexual assault who survived
and whose perpetrator is serving life in prison.
Speaker 5: And it's like people are.
Speaker 6: Motivated by good here and they think that they're advocating
on behalf of victims of sexual abuse without understanding that
they're advocating right now for the elimination of life possibility
of prole as a custodial sense in the state of
California and more broadly life offenses in general, which is
everything that George Gascon and his ideological ILKs stand for.
And the people that will suffer are the innocent men, women,
and children in the state of California when those when
the sexual predators start getting released. And this is a
scream at my TV moment for me, it drives me
insane when I see Kim Kardashian advocating for the release
of these guys, she should know better that truly the
people that benefit here are the most predatory biggest bullies
and monsters that you can imagine. And let me tell
you that the golden days of serial killers. They did
a documentary on how that, for strangely in California was
the late seventies and early eighties. Guys were catching those
guys now after their first rape or second rape because
forensic science, as they're building up to the murder part,
they get better. You are going to have a I'm
telling you right now, we will have a new rash
of serial killers in the state of California if guys
like George Gascon have their way and these people are
released in mass which is what's going to happen if
l WOP is eliminated as a sentence, and that is
what this entire case is the vanguard of see.
Speaker 4: What you want all of your cases, matt.
Speaker 5: I promised you I wasn't gonna ran I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Matte.
Speaker 6: Now you said you told me your listeners had were
really smart and had great questions.
Speaker 5: So I think the current term is triggered. These are
such good questions. I'm being triggered.
Speaker 4: No, I love it, and this is exactly what we want.
We need people who can explain this to those of
us who do not have the legal background. We don't
know your training. We need you to tell us that.
Speaker 6: Let me throw in a let me throw in another
thing for your listeners to educate themselves on this. In
addition of my book on writing I'll Call It, which
I'm not just pitching my book, I wrote an entire
chapter on this and this entire concept of releasing these
guys because he was a member of the Revolving Door
Criminal Justices and we had in California.
Speaker 5: The idea that they call themselves progressives.
Speaker 6: Okay, and I am, like again, politically neutral guy here,
but when it comes to public safety, this is not
progressive at all. This is regressive to the policies that
we had in the seventies that allowed for the release
of guys like writing I'll Call And I spent seven
years with the families of his victims as we put
that case back together and retried that man. There is
a wonderful article written by a guy named Alan Abramson
who was a professor of journalism at the Annenberg Journalism
School at USC and he was an LA Times reporter.
Again not exactly.
Speaker 5: A show for the prosecution, right.
Speaker 6: He observed the Menendez trials. He covered him as a
beat reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote a
wonderful article recently basically saying why people that are calling
for the release of the Menendez brothers are out of
their minds and they don't understand this is an LA
Times reporter who's now a professor of journalism, who watched
the trial firsthand, understands the evidence better than anybody. People
should find his article. Alan Abramson just wrote this thing,
and I'm blanking on the publication it was in, but
you can google it.
Speaker 5: It is a biting commentary on what we're seeing right now.
Speaker 4: I think it actually goes really well to our next
question from Laura Bath, who asks, I'm concerned the Menendez
brothers may reoffend once they get out. Can Matt speak
to recidivism rates among those people who have been re sentenced?
Speaker 6: Thank you very much, now, gascon Mark Twain had a
great quote.
Speaker 5: Okay, and I love this.
Speaker 6: You had a lot of great quotes, but one of
my favorites was there's lies, damn lies and statistics. In
other words, like everybody can manipulate statistics, and gascone is
going around regarding this Resentencing Unit. How little recidivism there
has been for my money for a vanity project for
a guy like Gascone, And I think he said they've
done like one hundred and only four have reoffended. If
there's four murders committed, that's for too many. If there's
four child moless from guys that had life sentences, that's
for too many. So once we catch these guys, especially
the real predators, it is incumbent upon elected officials to
do their fricking job and protect the public from people
once they have established themselves as being sexual predators. So
when it comes to Lyle and Eric, it's somewhat different
because there wasn't a sexual component and so they wouldn't
have the same compulsion. And let's face it, not to
be glib here, they're out of parents to kill, but
they are. So if they got out, chances are those
two guys they very well might They they could re offend,
But the circumstances will never align here. They're all of
the money that they expected to get from this washed
away into legal fees. Almost immediately. There was a fifteen
million dollar insurance policy they expected to get from Jose's company.
His entertainment company that it had already lapsed, so they
didn't get And there's also I believe, a multimillion dollar
insurance policy that of course they weren't entitled to because
they killed their parents, they don't have money. There's nobody
to kill again to access money in their world. So
hopefully the risk of recidivism is low. But the larger
question here is when you're talking about the victims of
violent crime. Okay, there's a saying in homicide, your best
victim is or your best witness is always dead. Okay,
And this is probably the biggest example of victim blaming.
Imagine if Kitty Menendez could come back and be given
an opportunity to refute the allegations is against her and
her husband, right, or at least say, okay, great Jose
was bad at the kids, what about me?
Speaker 5: How can you do that?
Speaker 6: There's no self defense there, there's no rational argument for
self defense there. And everybody uses the parents as like
a monolithic block with parents like they use the family
as a monolithic block, like the family wants them out.
Absolutely empirically false. The family does not. The family is
divided on that. It's the same thing with Kitty and
all the stuff about I'm sorry, I'm on a tangent here,
but all the stuff like Jose doesn't necessarily apply to Kitty.
So the thing is that in addition to just their
risk of reoffending, which the vast majority of elwock prisoners
that they're released as far as I'm a concerned one
hundred percent of guarantee they're going to reofense, especially the
sexual ones. But this is one where if you plot
the murder of another human being for the purpose of
taking money, and it's elaborate, this was I don't know.
I'm down with the philosophy that your life is forfeit,
that you should have to die in prison. And as
soon as we say the special circus are the special circumstances,
it is a very small list of murders like drug
ripoffs not a special circase, domestic violence murders not special circase,
the vast majority of gunn of gang crimes not special circases.
Speaker 5: So that the cases that qualify for life without.
Speaker 6: Possibility of parole are such a minuscule percent overall of
homicides committed in general, that my thing is, where is
the justice for double homicide victims? Now this is interfamiliar,
but a lot of times it's not a lot of
times we're the next guy up, by the way, will
be somebody who lined up workers at a home depot
and shot them all on the back of the head.
That's the next multiple murder for financial gain. That's the
typical murder for financial game that you see where you
have innocent store workers who are taken into the store
room and execute it. So I get Zach, I get
out too, No wow, offer him. That's the problem with
this slippery slope that a lot of people without contemplating
the consequences of something like this.
Speaker 4: Matt, what do you anticipate the outcome is going to
be in this case? You have said that the judge
does not have to resentence the Menendez brothers. What do
you think ultimately is going to come of this?
Speaker 6: I think that what may ultimately come of this is
and this is just pure guests here. There can be
a sentencing range.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 6: So one of the options is that the court con
sent resentence I believe, and sentenced because we have a
firstgree murder with a firearm. He can sentence for the
first murder plus the gun enhancement which I think we
may see something down in the middle here where it's
something short of immediate release, but maybe type thing where
they get a parole hearing. And I haven't done the
math on it, and we have to go back to
nineteen eighty nine, the nineteen eighty nine statute. In modern
times that would be fifty life. So the court could say, okay,
you no longer have al up and sence you to
fifty years to life, and then they we would have
another ten years before the next pearl hearing. I haven't
done the math on the enhancement from nineteen eighty nine.
It was different than that, but that's an option that
the court could have. So I think if I had
to guess, we're going to see something where he will
take the recommendation and split the baby, and then they
won't get a pearl hearing immediately, but they might get
a parol hearing in three or four years, and everybody
can chill out and move on to the next flashy
topic on Netflix, and then.
Speaker 5: They'll quietly get parolled. When you're talking.
Speaker 6: About an inner family thing, I think a plenty of
judges would go, okay, thirty five years. I'm satisfied that
they've paid their debt. I could see a judge doing
that and not being irrational. The question is, going back
to Elizabeth's comment, is what a dangerous precedent that sets,
especially with hardcore activist guys like George Gascon who advocate
essentially and the only people that come in my opinion
that he's aggressively prosecuted that we've seen, or police officers'
that came in with that, also announcing that from day one.
And I actually represented a police officer involved in a
fatal officer involved shooting that was cleared in twenty eighteen,
but they indicted him from manslaughter, and I believe my
client is actually innocent. First person I've ever represented that
I can actually say that about. So Anyway, there's an
ancient curse guy's called They said, may you live in
interesting times? And we live in very interesting times. I'm
sorry for my passion on this and for the rams,
and I'm sure plenty of your listeners I've watched that
Netflix theories and might think that I'm crazy, but this
is based on my experience dealing with George Gascone as
a DA and the clients and all of my also
I should say I've represented the families of two murdered
police officers, just to give you an example of some
of the impact of these policies, and we're wrapping up here.
One of them was a SHAREFF Stepia sergeant who was
on responded to a burglary and somehow the bad guy
who's a documentary gang member, got the drop on him.
He managed to wound the officer who's on his back
with survivable wounds. He shot him four times in the
face and once in the badge, okay, and executed him.
And he was a good man and a good police
officer with the family that loved him. I represented the
family after George Gascon came in, because when you eliminate
the gang enhancement, and you'll eliminate the strikes and you
eliminate the gun enhancement. From the moment that I got in,
that man who had multiple violent felonies in his background,
a documented gang member, who executed a police officer and
the shot in the badge says a lot right. He
would have received a parole hearing under George Gascon's policies
in eight years after I came in in the case,
eight years and that is outrageous. That is outrageous, that
that is a slap in the face to victims a
violent crime. Everywhere, it's practically spitting in the face the
surviving police officer's family. And I did everything I could
to oppose that, and we won on that, but it
was he'd already been he've.
Speaker 5: Gone through the preliminary hearing.
Speaker 6: Fortunately there's we haven't had a case exactly like that sense,
and hopefully we've hit bottom in my hometown of Los Angeles.
Speaker 4: Matt. There is clearly so much more to this than
meets the eye, and we can't thank you enough for
spending time with us and bringing your passion and commitment
for this.
Speaker 6: So thank you so much, No, thank you guys, thank
you for having me that.
Speaker 4: Is going to do it for this episode of mind
Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see
you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
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