Erik and Lyle Menendez don't deserve to get out of prison over new molestation allegations against their father ... at least according to a reporter who covered the brothers' first trial.
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00:00What is your take on this, having covered it as intensely as anybody?
00:07My take is pretty direct and pretty simple. The brothers are stone-cold killers and they deserve to be in prison for the rest of their lives.
00:15Does any of the new evidence move you?
00:18The letter that they presented yesterday, this letter from Eric to a cousin before the murder.
00:24Right, right. Alluding to abuse and being scared of his father.
00:28The question is not whether Jose Menendez was a good father, a bad father, a horrible father. None of that makes any difference.
00:36The legal standard is, were Eric and Lyle Menendez in fear for their lives at the moment they burst into the den at 722 North Elm Drive and blew their father's brains out and blew their mother's face off?
00:51And the question is, was that fear imminent? And the answer to that is no.
00:55The parents were sitting there in the den watching TV. There was no fear whatsoever.
00:59Alan, do you think that the fact that the abuse evidence, as they believe it to be evidence of their molestations, if that had been allowed in the second trial, do you still think that the outcome should be the same verdict?
01:17The abuse evidence was allowed in the second trial that Lyle Menendez did not take the stand.
01:23But Eric Menendez did testify. But as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeals court that reviewed this case in 2005.
01:31And it's a huge mystery to me why almost no one except for me seems to pay attention to this ruling.
01:37It said that abuse evidence and none of it has ever been corroborated.
01:42None of it. That abuse evidence is, to use that word, misplaced because it doesn't go to whether the brothers were in, quote, unquote, imminent fear for their lives at the moment they burst into the den, which they were not.
01:55So whether or not they were, quote, unquote, abused is absolutely neither relevant nor material.