Menendez Brothers Get Parole Hearing Moved Up to March 2027, One Year After Board Cited Prison Rule Violations

Erik and Lyle Menendez, serving time for murdering their parents in 1989, will get another shot at parole sooner than expected. The California Board of Parole Hearings has scheduled a parole suitability hearing for March 2027, according to the family's spokesperson and confirmed by CBS News, Fox News, KESQ, LAist and KTTV Fox 11. That's roughly 17 months earlier than the August 2028 date set after their last hearing.

The brothers shot their parents, Jose and Mary Louise "Kitty" Menendez, to death with shotguns at the family's Beverly Hills home on August 20, 1989. They were convicted in 1996 and sentenced to life without parole. In May 2025, a judge resentenced them to 50 years to life, which made them parole-eligible because both were under 26 when they committed the murders, according to CBS News.

That resentencing didn't happen in a vacuum. It came after a Netflix series revived public interest in the case and fueled a campaign for their release, Fox News reported. Whether a streaming dramatization should factor into how California handles a 36-year-old double murder is a fair question nobody in the source reporting directly answers.

The Board Just Denied Them Last Year

The parole board denied Erik and Lyle in August 2025. Commissioner Robert Barton cited prison violations, including the brothers' use of illegal cellphones and incidents of violence, according to CBS News. This occurred just 13 months before the new, earlier hearing date was announced.

Proposition 9, a 2008 ballot measure that amended the state constitution to expand crime-victim rights, includes two provisions letting the board move up an inmate's next hearing if there's "a change in circumstances or new information" suggesting the person may now be suitable for parole, according to The Orange County Register's reporting, cited by Fox News and KESQ. None of the available reporting specifies what that new information actually is. The board hasn't detailed what changed between a denial tied to disciplinary violations and a decision, little more than a year later, to move the next hearing up.

Advocates for the brothers will say four decades of behavior, including the hospice program and "Green Space" initiative the family cites in their statement, speaks for itself. Skeptics point to the board's own commissioner flagging ongoing violations just last year and ask why that record now supports an accelerated hearing rather than a delayed one.

Prosecutors Still Dispute the Abuse Claims

The brothers have long argued the killings were committed in self-defense after years of sexual and physical abuse by their father. Prosecutors have never accepted that framing, arguing instead that Erik and Lyle killed their parents for money, according to Fox News and WRGA News. In September 2025, LA Superior Court Judge William Ryan denied the brothers' petition for a new trial based on two pieces of alleged new evidence about Jose Menendez's abuse, ruling the evidence "is not so compelling that it would have produced a reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror," according to CBS News.

That ruling shows a state judge, reviewing the same abuse allegations the family cites as central to the parole push, wasn't persuaded the new evidence changes the legal picture. The parole board operates under a different standard than a courtroom, weighing rehabilitation and current risk rather than guilt, but the unresolved dispute over what actually happened in 1989 hangs over every step of this process.

A Broader Fight Over California's Parole Rules

Fox News framed the Menendez update alongside a separate legal fight. Former Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert is leading a lawsuit challenging new Board of Parole Hearings guidelines that she argues could open a path to release for serial killers and mass shooters. That lawsuit isn't about the Menendez case specifically, and no source ties it directly to this scheduling decision. But it reflects a live argument in California over how much discretion parole boards should have to reconsider violent offenders, and the Menendez case is likely to become Exhibit A in that debate regardless of the outcome.

Erik Menendez is 55. Lyle is 58. Both remain incarcerated at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. The March 2027 hearing is tentative, and the board could still deny parole a second time, as it did in 2025. What isn't yet public is the specific record of good conduct or new circumstances the board is relying on to justify moving the date up, a detail that will likely surface as the hearing approaches and victims' rights groups weigh in.