Kim Kardashian supports the Menndez brothers in a personal essay shared exclusively with NBC News on Thursday, in which she writes that I have spent time with Lyle and Erik; They are not monsters.
Kardashian, the reality TV star and businesswoman who has used her celebrity platform to advocate for inmates on criminal justice issues, believes Lyle and Erik Menndez were treated unfairly by prosecutors and in the media. The brothers, who were convicted of murdering their parents, Jos and Kitty, in their Beverly Hills, California, home, were convicted before the trial began, he writes.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles County district attorney said that Your office will review possible evidence to determine whether the brothers should be resentenced and possibly released, officials said.
Erik Menndez was 18 and Lyle Menndez was 21 when their parents were shot to death in 1989.
My hope is that Erik and Lyle Menndez’s life sentences will be reconsidered, Kardashian says.
We owe it to those little children who lost their childhood, who never had the opportunity to be heard, helped or saved, he adds.
The brothers’ case has generated renewed interest with the Netflix biographical series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, and their lives are the subject of an upcoming documentary on Netflix, The Menendez Brothers.
Last month, Kardashian met the brothers when she spoke about prison reform with inmates at a California prison near San Diego. Actor Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menndez in the Netflix series, accompanies her.
Erik Menndez, now 53, had previously criticized the dramatized depiction of his and his brother’s life in the Netflix series as “blatant lies” and accused the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, of deliberately presenting a caricature of Lyle Menndez. , who is now 56 years old.
At their first trial in 1993, which was televised, the brothers said their father, a record company executive, sexually abused them for years and that they acted in self-defense out of fear and prolonged trauma. Prosecutors, however, said they murdered their parents to inherit money and went on a spending spree.
The first trial ended with hung juries. When the brothers were tried together again beginning in 1995, most of their abuse allegations were deemed inadmissible in court. They were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The socialite seeks to allow the father to attend his daughter’s funeral.
Kardashian acknowledged in her essay that the brothers’ crimes are not excusable and neither was their behavior after the murders.
But, he argues, there were also limited resources for victims of sexual abuse, particularly children, at the time.
I don’t think spending his entire natural life in prison was the appropriate punishment for this complex case. If this crime had been committed and tried today, I believe the outcome would have been dramatically different, he writes.
The brothers’ lawyers are trying to challenge their imprisonment based on evidence that was not disclosed at trial.
Kardashian has been a strong advocate for judicial reform. In April, he joined Vice President Kamala Harris for a White House roundtable with four people whom President Joe Biden had pardoned earlier in the week for nonviolent drug offenses.
Kardashian also visited the White House during former President Donald Trump’s administration on several occasions, including in 2018, when she pushed for the release of Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence a few days after the meeting.
In 2019, Kardashian said she was studying to obtain her law degree.
This article was originally published in English on NBC News. click here to read it.