Release Menendez brothers….impose death penalty on life imprisonment

 

Release Menendez brothers….impose death penalty on life imprisonment

 

It’s good to hear LA District Attorney George Gascon recommending Erik and Lyle Menendez be released after serving 35 years of a life sentence for killing their parents in 1989.

"I believe that they have paid their debt to society," are words one never hears from top prosecutors in heinous murder cases. But it’s about time. Society squanders billions of scarce public treasure to become essentially a nursing home for aging murderers who are no longer a threat to society.

 

Indeed, the Menendez boys, just 19 and 21 when they shot gunned their parents to death, may have been acting from extreme parental abuse that was prevented from discussion during the retrial that convicted them in 1996.

 

DA Gascon understands that the unallowed evidence may have resulted in a prison term lower than the actual 35 years they have now served. Gascon believes the two are no longer a threat to society at large, if they ever were.

 

The Menendez case should reemphasize the need to abolish life sentences including its noxious corollary, ‘without parole.’ They are a throwback to unenlightened times when the goto punishment for murder, if not the death penalty, was life in a prison cage. But life sentences have nothing to do with punishing wrongdoing and protecting society. They are primarily a reflex revenge action that hinders rather than improves society.

 

Over 200,000 of America’s 1,400,000 prisoners are serving life. Some cannot safely be released till they’re to infirm to no longer threaten society. But many thousands have been rehabilitated, indeed have become decent persons after long incarceration, justifying their eligibility for parole.

That certainly applies to the Menendez brothers. A couple of hundred thousand more deserve their chance at improving the American system of justice thru parole as well.