Matt Gutman
Appearances
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He reconsiders, and then he comes out with his ruling on whether he would support resentencing of the brothers in this upcoming hearing. And remember, the ship has already sailed. Trains left the station. The judge has already approved the previous DA's motion to start the resentencing process, right?
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And there are a couple of California laws that essentially give a tremendous amount of discretion to a judge to allow this to happen, including one called AB600. And There's some precedent indicating that the new DA can't roll back this ruling that a resentencing hearing is going to happen.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
We're talking about Kitty and Jose Menendez. And Jose Menendez was really a star in the entertainment world, right? He's involved in music producing. He has become a millionaire. He has single-handedly raised his family and all of his extended family up. This is an American success story, right? Basically came from Cuba. They were virtually penniless.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Right. And what a lot of people thought was going to happen, Brad, and there's a whole group of people in Los Angeles who are Menendez brothers watchers and experts, right? Like, massive legal teams and who are very close observers of the case. They felt that, okay... What Ackman's doing is probably smart.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He's going to try to turn down the brothers' effort to try to get a new trial based on this new evidence. And then he's going to actually relent on the resentencing. Right. Because there's like different paths. There's the habeas thing and then there's the other thing. Right. There are two paths.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And so the first path, which was the habeas petition, which is, hey, let's have a new trial for these brothers, given the new evidence that is out there. He shut the door on that in February. And so a lot of people who watch the proceedings about the Menendez brothers thought that, OK, well, Hockman will relent on the second path, which is the resentencing, because
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
We've all seen the data and the documents that have come out of the California prison system which show that these guys are exemplary prisoners. They have created hospice programs and substance abuse programs. They have created a mindfulness and yoga program. They have beautified the campus of the Donovan Correctional Facility where they live in a green space project.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They have the lowest security profile. So yes, maybe... Hockman will see that it might be better to give them a second chance and have them their sentence reduced or give them even the option of being resent and so that one day they could walk free, maybe one day soon. And so he stands up in front of the podium on March 10th. And what does he pronounce?
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He pronounces that these men remain the same men that they were in the 90s. They are congenital liars. They are murderers who purposely and with intent and premeditatedly poised those shotguns, pointed them right at the faces and heads of their parents, and pulled the trigger. And when they ran out of those shotgun shells because they've plugged so many holes in the bodies of their parents...
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They reloaded and shot again. He said those are the same men. They are not rehabilitated right now. They continue to issue at least 20 lies that Hockman said that they continue to say, and I will not support their resentencing in this upcoming hearing.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Exactly. So it's still up to the judge. The judge has a lot of discretion, but it makes it a bit of a thornier decision for the judge because now he's going to be going directly against the authority of, you know, the highest elected legal official in the largest county in the United States. And that does complicate things. And so after that decision, I actually interviewed D.A.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Hockman one-on-one, and he said, well, you know, there is actually a pathway through which the brothers can get my support for resentencing, and he laid it out for me.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Like, do you want them to enumerate each individual lie? Do you have a checklist? I actually do. And so basically what he's saying is that the brothers admitted to the murders and they have apologized to the family members, by the way, and made peace with the family members about the murders.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
But what they haven't done, according to Hockman, is admit to a long list of lies, which he says that they made in the years after the murder. And so if they admit to those lies publicly, then he would change his stance on resentencing. And, you know, you can hear I asked him, do you have a list? He's like, in fact, I do have a list.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
By the way, the brothers lawyers tell me that is very unlikely to happen for a series of reasons, including that it might expose the brothers to other charges.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And now he is living in a multimillion dollar Beverly Hills mansion. He's got these two kids, Eric and Lyle, chiseled faces, forearms, muscled and veined from tennis and sports. And they're just like poster children of Beverly Hills kids, you know, with these mops of thick, dark hair. You know, they look the part. But obviously something went very, very wrong.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
100%. I mean, it would just take a scribble of the pen and their sentences would be completely commuted. Governor Newsom has said that he's not quite interested in doing that, but he has taken a very big step in starting the process towards seeing them granted some sort of clemency. And that happened right after that press conference with D.A. Hockman.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He basically initiated a risk analysis process by which parole board members were would assess whether the brothers would pose a risk to society if they were released from prison and that assessment is going on as we speak the brothers have the first meeting from the parole board in june and it is very possible that it's that parole board
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
in a process initiated by the governor, who has the most power in the state of California, that is going to see the brothers' pathway towards resentencing and eventual release opened. But Brad, it could be sometime, and it's very possible that Eric and Lyle are not released at the same time because Lyle has a couple of very minor, but infractions nonetheless, on his record in prison.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So we have this hearing coming up in a little over a week in which the judge will meet with the defense attorneys and the DA's prosecutors. And he'll basically make an assessment of whether that resentencing hearing can continue, can go on as planned on April 17th and 18th. And it seems likely, given previous indications, that he will at least allow that hearing to go on. And that's a big deal.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So we don't know what will happen from that hearing. We do know that the brothers have been, by and large, exemplary prisoners. And just an example comes up. They've been in the system in California for 35 years. Neither of them have ever been in a physical altercation, not a single one. So, you know, it's those kinds of things.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
It's the fact that their families now unanimously, because the one holdout who was against the brothers, Uncle Milton, passed away recently. So now every single surviving family member of Kitty and Jose Menendez unanimously and strongly supports the brothers' release and their resentencing. And that actually makes a big difference because we're talking about the victims, right?
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
The victims matter in the U.S. justice system. And in this case, the victims are advocating strongly for the resentencing and release of the perpetrators.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
It's a really good question, Brad, and I think about it all the time. Why are people... including my 16-year-old daughter, so obsessed with this case, right? Like, I have never seen her be more interested in anything involved in the news in her entire life. And her dad is in the news. She has never taken interest. But this is such a big thing.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
You know, part of it is because of the massive social media traction, because of the Netflix drama series, which she watched, Monsters. And part of it is because I think for people like us as well, it hearkens back to our past, but also has us reassessing our present. What is a crime? What is unforgivable? What makes a crime forgivable, right?
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Like how much do we take into account the fact that the Menendez brothers were so apparently abused, so heinously and mercilessly abused by a man who was allegedly a monster that none of us knew about, right? I think it makes all of us reassess the intricacies of the criminal justice system and what we view is justice.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And on this hot August 20th night, 1989, Kitty and Jose are gunned down. And not just gunned down. This is like brutal, nasty, visceral, up-close murder. Shotgun blasts to the kneecaps, to the back of the head on Jose. The mother is crawling at some point. She's shotgunned. They actually had to reload the shotguns, whoever the assailants were.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
These are questions I think a lot of us think about when it comes to the criminal justice system.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And it was so gruesome that police didn't quite know what to make of it initially, especially because Eric and Lyle Menendez, as you mentioned, 18 and 21 at the time, were like, hey, it's not us. They were intruders. And then the different stories started to come out and they never quite made sense. And then in March of 1990, police pretty much started to piece together what was going on.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They arrested Eric and Lyle, and they understood that these two young men had premeditated this murder. They had planned to murder their parents. They had purchased shotguns. They had driven down to near San Diego to buy them. They had shotgunned their parents. They had reloaded at some point. It was face-to-face and intimate. This was a killing that involved a tremendous amount of personal hatred.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Right. They are now saying that they murdered their parents because they had to, because of self-defense, because they were afraid of their father. And this unspools something else that was also completely novel and really sort of earth shattering. There was now open talk in court and in the public about about these two now young men being sexually abused by their father, Brad.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Well, the reaction in court was multifaceted. I mean, at one point, the prosecutor said that men can't be raped or can't be sexually abused, something to that effect, by other men. In the public, it was shock and disgust and sadness. And I think a lot of people believe that. But...
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
the jurors weren't quite convinced brad it was a hung jury for both brothers and that set up the second trial this time the brothers are actually tried together and it's a trial presided over by a judge named stanley weisberg and again we're talking about the mid 90s right more is and cultural attitudes towards male sexual abuse were different.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And this time, Judge Weisberg limited the inclusion of sexual assault and the testimony allegedly corroborating the sexual assault, calling that testimony, quote, the abuse excuse. Today, obviously, that would never happen. So a large amount of testimony and evidence that was included in the first trial was excluded from the second trial.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And so it was a very different type of imperfect self-defense that was set up for the brothers in their second trial in 1996.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They're saying. that, OK, maybe they didn't believe that on that specific night at that specific time, their father, Jose Menendez, had a gun by his side and was going to murder them and their lives were immediately in danger. But they felt that at some point in the near or.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
uncertain future that they would be significantly harmed to the point of being killed by their father and that their mother would be a bystander and that they felt that they had to defend themselves and this was the way to do it it's sort of preemptively acting in self-defense now
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Because of how this was presented in court and because of what the prosecution alleged and because of the facts of the case, the jury didn't buy it. The jury convicted them of first-degree murder. And not just of first-degree murder, but first-degree murder with special circumstances that the brothers were trying to enrich themselves as a result of the murder.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And that's why eventually they were sentenced to two consecutive life prison terms without the possibility of parole. That means that no matter what they do, they will have to spend the entirety of their natural lives in prison until they die.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So this is called a habeas corpus petition. This habeas corpus petition was filed with the court. And basically it says that years after the brothers were convicted, a cousin of theirs, Andy Cano, found a letter or somebody found it in his box of letters. It's from Eric to his cousin, Andy Cano, about the alleged abuse before the murders happened. Let me read some of it.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
It says, I've been trying to avoid dad. It's still happening. Andy, but it's even worse for me now. Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. I'm afraid. He's crazy. And it took a while to have this materialized, partly because Andy Cano died in the early 2000s. And nobody brought this forward. The second piece was produced during a documentary.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So Roy Rosello was a former member of this boy band named Menudo. It was big in the 80s and 90s. And he appears in this docuseries called Menendez and Menudo, Boys Betrayed. And he says on camera that he was also raped by the brother's father, Jose Menendez, indicating that this was not just happening to the boys, but that other people were allegedly sexually abused by Jose Menendez.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Right. Some of the family members denied that this was happening, but other family members said, no, in fact, we knew about it. And one of the most prominent is Joan, the 93-year-old aunt of Eric and Lyle Menendez and Kitty Menendez's sister. And she very publicly said that the brothers never knew on any given night whether they would be raped. And so there was an evolution in the family.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Very quickly, they supported the brothers, but also quite quickly, they began not only to support them, but to try to demand or ask that they be released. And so there's this confluence of events. There is this documentary that comes out that shows the letter from Andy Cano and Roy Rosellas. on camera talking about being raped by Jose Menendez.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
There's the dramatized version from Ryan Murphy called Monsters, which is a scripted series about the brothers, but also talks about their alleged abuse by their father. It creates this groundswell of interest that propels this story back into the limelight. It's thrust in front of LASDA George Cascone in the form of this habeas corpus petition.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Well, the question is which DA, right? So the first DA, George Casco was after a while swayed by this. And there may be a couple of reasons. First, We're so quick to forget the zeitgeist and the cultural moment, but really at the end of 2023 and 2024, lots of people started talking about the case, and it started picking up momentum on TikTok.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And then one of the country's very biggest influencers got on this bandwagon, and that's Kim Kardashian. And she really created this social media phenomenon of trying to get the brothers released. And There was a groundswell of this, and in late 2024, this had been reviewed by L.A. 's D.A. George Gascon at the time and his deputy district attorneys.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And they came to the conclusion, which they announced in October, just before the elections, by the way. I don't know if that was incidental or not. that they would punt on whether or not to recommend a new trial based on the habeas case.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
But right now they would recommend resentencing for the brothers based on their rehabilitation in prison, their good deeds, and the fact that it seems that they would not be a threat to society if they were out in public again.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So there was literally a new sheriff in town, Brad, with a completely different set of ideas. And initially... DA Nathan Hockman, who took office on December 2nd, kept his cards close-ish to his vest. He very appropriately said, I know this is a big case. I know that there is tremendous public interest in this case. So what I want to do is spend some time with my team to review all the documents.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And remember... Two big, very long trials, a tremendous amount of paperwork having to do with their 35 years in prison. All the ancillary stuff, the letters and the habeas petitions and the various motions that have been filed over the years. So we're talking about Hockman and his team going through something like 50,000 pages of documents.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
There was visual and audio tapes that they were going through. That takes time. And then all of a sudden, January 7th, the massive fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. And that basically pressed pause on everything that happened in this city for at least a month. And so Hockman and his team asked to continue the hearing, which was supposed to happen in January. It got delayed.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Then it got delayed again. It was supposed to be in March. And now it's going to be in April where they were going to decide on the resentencing for the brothers. But before that happened, Brad, Hockman decided that he would have a press conference.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And his first press conference about the Menendez brothers was in February, in which he announced that, no, he's not going to go with that habeas corpus petition, that he does not believe that the new evidence that was purportedly brought to the attention of the previous DA and him, the letter to Andy Cano and the testimony by Ro Rossello, He said it's been too much time.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
This stuff should have come out before. It doesn't hold water. The evidence seems to indicate, according to Hockman, that the brothers were not sexually abused and that their serial lies leading up to their first trial. indicate that they should not be given a new trial based on this evidence. And he shot it down. But he did something that really upset the family and victims of sexual abuse.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
The way he put down the brothers' allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of their father seemed to many people to be And the family very quickly, like within an hour of that press conference, put out this livid statement. And I just want to read to you part of the statement the family put out, like, quote, District Attorney Nathan Hockman took us right back to 1996. That's the second trial.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He opened the wounds we have spent decades trying to heal. He didn't listen to us. To suggest that the years of abuse couldn't have led to the tragedy in 1989 is not only outrageous but also dangerous. Abuse does not exist in a vacuum. They also called his press conference hostile and basically said that they'll continue to fight for the Brothers' release.
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They say, quote, and all we are asking for is to right this decade's long injustice, they wrote, Brad.