On September 15, Judge William Ryan of Los Angeles Superior Court denied the Menendez brothers’ petition for a new trial. Their lawyers argued that two critical pieces of evidence were not heard by the jury that convicted them. One of these was a letter Erik had written to his cousin, describing the years of sexual abuse by his father, José Menendez. The other was a declaration from Roy Rosselló, a former member of the boy band Menudo, that he had been sexually abused by José Menendez.

Judge Ryan found that this evidence was not compelling enough to have changed the outcome by either producing reasonable doubt in the mind of a juror or negating the finding of premeditation and deliberation. But when the brothers testified to the sexual abuse at their first trial, more than one jury member did indeed find it compelling. That jury could not reach a verdict. It was in the second trial, when testimony on sexual abuse was excluded, that a guilty verdict was returned.

In the petition for a new trial, the prosecutor objected to the evidence on the basis of timeliness, stating that the letter was decades old. "Timeliness" is much less central to the question of what led to the murder than the profound impact of the abuse that occurred repeatedly. The denial of a new trial seems to rest on technical issues,........

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