Those looking to watch in court as the Menendez brothers appear for a hearing on Monday will have to take a number.
The Los Angeles Superior Court will be holding a lottery for 16 seats that are open to the public, requiring interested parties to show up outside the courthouse between 8-9 a.m. on Monday, November 25. The live drawing will take place between 9-9:30 a.m.
Despite the carnival overtone of the offer, strict rules apply: Those who receive a badge cannot transfer it to anyone else, and attempts at transfer will disqualify the ticket-holder.
Lotto winners who are not present when the 10:30 a.m. hearing begins risk losing their seats, which would be given to the two standby tickets that will also be drawn at the lottery. Badges are good only for the day.
According to The Los Angeles Times, lotteries like this one “are not unusual for high-profile cases,“ like for example the O.J. Simpson trial, where they also did a raffle for seats.
Interest in Erik and Lyle Menendez has recently spiked after a documentary and a Ryan Murphy series landed on Netflix this year.
The brothers originally received life sentences without the possibility of parole for the 1989 murder of their parents, José and Mary Louis “Kitty” Menendez. The couple was shot to death in their Beverly Hills mansion, and the brothers—18 and 21 at the time—first tried to pin blame on intruders, before Erik subsequently admitted the truth to his therapist.
The Menendez brothers were then arrested and tried, and have at this point served more than 30 years in prison for the killings. But they’ve also been lobbying for clemency on the basis that their father allegedly subjected them to sexual and physical abuse for years, while their mother let it happen. The killings, they say, were self-defense.
New evidence of said abuse forms the basis for the petition at the center of Monday’s hearing. Former L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón also supported the brothers’ resentencing, but he was voted out of office earlier this month. His successor, Nathan Hochman, has said he plans to closely review the case.
The resentencing hearing, which could lead to the brothers’ release on parole, is scheduled for December 11. Monday’s hearing deals with their attorneys’ efforts to downgrade their conviction from murder to manslaughter, according to the Times.
