LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lyle Menendez was denied parole Friday by the same board that a day earlier rejected his brother Erik’s appeal for freedom after serving decades in prison for killing their parents in 1989 at their Beverly Hills mansion. The reason was the same: misbehavior behind bars.
A panel of two commissioners denied Lyle Menendez parole for three years after a daylong hearing. Commissioners noted the older brother still displayed "anti-social personality traits like deception, minimization and rule-breaking that lie beneath that positive surface.”
“We do understand that you had very little hope of being released for years," said commissioner Julie Garland. “Citizens are expected to follow the rules whether or not there is some incentive to do so."
She also said the panel found his remorse genuine and that he has been a “model inmate in many ways who has demonstrated the potential for change.”
“Don’t ever not have hope,” she told Menendez.
The brothers were sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for fatally shooting their father, Jose Menendez, and mother, Kitty Menendez, in their Beverly Hills mansion almost exactly 36 years ago on Aug. 20, 1989. While defense attorneys argued that the brothers acted out of self-defense after years of sexual abuse by their father, prosecutors said the brothers sought a multimillion-dollar inheritance.
A judge reduced their sentences in May, and they became immediately eligible for parole. The parole hearings marked the closest they have come to winning freedom since their convictions almost 30 years ago.
Erik Menendez, who is being held at the same prison in San Diego, was denied parole Thursday after commissioners determined his misbehavior in prison made him still a risk to public safety.
A day later, Lyle Menendez told the parole board details about the abuse he suffered under his parents. He cried, face reddened, while delivering his closing statement. He seemed to still want to protect his “baby brother,” telling commissioners he took sole responsibility for the murders.
“I will never be able to make up for the harm and grief I caused everyone in my family," he said. “I am so sorry to everyone, and I will be forever sorry.”
The state corrections department chose a single reporter to watch the videoconference and share details with the rest of the press.
The panel began by asking how abuse impacted decision-making in his life.
The older brother described how his father physically abused him by choking, punching and hurting him using a belt.
“I was the special son in my family. My brother was the castaway," he said. "The physical abuse was focused on me because I was more important to him, I felt.”
He also said his mother also sexually abused him. He appeared uncomfortable discussing this with the panel, who asked why he didn't disclose his mother's abuse in a risk assessment conducted earlier this year.
Commissioners asked if one death made him more sorrowful than the other.
“My mother. Because I loved her and couldn’t imagine harming her in any way," he said. “I think also I learned a lot after about her life, her childhood, reflecting on how much fear maybe she felt.”
Later, he broke down in tears when recounting how they confronted their mother about Jose Menendez's abuse of his younger brother.
“I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that she knew," he said.
Lyle Menendez's parole lawyer, Heidi Rummel, was more outspoken during his hearing than the one for Erik Menendez on Thursday.
She quarreled with the commissioners over several lines of questioning and whether the panel had access to trial evidence in the case.
The panel asked Lyle Menendez whether the murders were planned, and about the brothers buying guns.
“There was zero planning. There was no way to know it was going to happen Sunday,” he said, referring to buying the guns as “the biggest mistake."
“I no longer believe that they were going to kill us in that moment,” he said. "At the time, I had that honest belief.”
Garland asked him about the “sophistication of the web of lies and manipulation you demonstrated afterward," referring to having witnesses lie for them in court — and attempts to destroy his father's will.
Menendez maintained that there was no plan, only that he was “flailing in what was happening” and didn't want to go to prison and be separated from his brother.
In closing, Rummel expressed frustration that the hearing spent almost no time on Menendez's achievements in prison or his efforts to build positive relationships with correctional staff. She noted he never touched drugs or alcohol inside.
“How many people with an LWOP sentence come in front of this board with zero violence, despite getting attacked, getting bullied, and choose to do something different?” she said.
More than a dozen of their relatives attended Friday’s hearing via videoconference, but many did not testify citing privacy concerns after learning audio from Erik Menendez's hearing Thursday was published online.
“I want my nephew to hear how much I love him, and believe in him," said his aunt, Teresita Menendez-Baralt. "I’m very proud of him and I want him to come home."
Similar to his brother's hearing the day before, the panel zeroed in on Menendez's use of cellphones in prison as recent as March 2025.
“I had convinced myself that this wasn’t a means that was harming anyone but myself in a rule violation," Menendez said.
He said correctional staff were monitoring his communications with his wife and family and selling them to tabloids, so he saw cellphones as a way to protect his privacy. There was “a lot of stress in his marriage” around the time he transferred to the prison in San Diego, and he wanted to stay in close touch with his wife, he said.
Commissioner Patrick Reardon applauded him for starting a prison beautification project and mentorship programs. However, he questioned if the cellphone violations tainted those accomplishments.
“I would never call myself a model incarcerated person," Menendez said. “I would say that I’m a good person, that I spent my time helping people. ... I’m the guy that officers will come to to resolve conflicts.”
The panel noted that a psychologist found that Menendez is at “very low” risk for violence upon release.
According to previous court documents, Menendez has not gotten into any fights in his time in prison. He said nonviolence was a promise he made to his grandmother.
“My life has been defined by extreme violence," he said. “I wanted to be defined by something else.”
The brothers still have a pending habeas corpus petition filed in May 2023 seeking a review of their convictions based on new evidence supporting their claims of sexual abuse by their father.
FILE - Lyle, left, and Erik Menendez sit in Beverly Hills Municipal Court where their attorneys delayed making pleas on their behalf in Beverly Hills, Calif., March 12, 1990. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
Lyle Menendez appears before the parole board via teleconference on Friday, Aug 22, 2025, at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. (California Department of Corrections via AP)
ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump would not be the first president to invoke the Insurrection Act, as he has threatened, so that he can send U.S. military forces to Minnesota.
But he'd be the only commander in chief to use the 19th-century law to send troops to quell protests that started because of federal officers the president already has sent to the area — one of whom shot and killed a U.S. citizen.
The law, which allows presidents to use the military domestically, has been invoked on more than two dozen occasions — but rarely since the 20th Century's Civil Rights Movement.
Federal forces typically are called to quell widespread violence that has broken out on the local level — before Washington's involvement and when local authorities ask for help. When presidents acted without local requests, it was usually to enforce the rights of individuals who were being threatened or not protected by state and local governments. A third scenario is an outright insurrection — like the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Experts in constitutional and military law say none of that clearly applies in Minneapolis.
“This would be a flagrant abuse of the Insurrection Act in a way that we've never seen,” said Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program. “None of the criteria have been met.”
William Banks, a Syracuse University professor emeritus who has written extensively on the domestic use of the military, said the situation is “a historical outlier” because the violence Trump wants to end “is being created by the federal civilian officers” he sent there.
But he also cautioned Minnesota officials would have “a tough argument to win” in court, because the judiciary is hesitant to challenge “because the courts are typically going to defer to the president” on his military decisions.
Here is a look at the law, how it's been used and comparisons to Minneapolis.
George Washington signed the first version in 1792, authorizing him to mobilize state militias — National Guard forerunners — when “laws of the United States shall be opposed, or the execution thereof obstructed.”
He and John Adams used it to quash citizen uprisings against taxes, including liquor levies and property taxes that were deemed essential to the young republic's survival.
Congress expanded the law in 1807, restating presidential authority to counter “insurrection or obstruction” of laws. Nunn said the early statutes recognized a fundamental “Anglo-American tradition against military intervention in civilian affairs” except “as a tool of last resort.”
The president argues Minnesota officials and citizens are impeding U.S. law by protesting his agenda and the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Customs and Border Protection officers. Yet early statutes also defined circumstances for the law as unrest “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course” of law enforcement.
There are between 2,000 and 3,000 federal authorities in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, compared to Minneapolis, which has fewer than 600 police officers. Protesters' and bystanders' video, meanwhile, has shown violence initiated by federal officers, with the interactions growing more frequent since Renee Good was shot three times and killed.
“ICE has the legal authority to enforce federal immigration laws,” Nunn said. “But what they're doing is a sort of lawless, violent behavior” that goes beyond their legal function and “foments the situation” Trump wants to suppress.
“They can't intentionally create a crisis, then turn around to do a crackdown,” he said, adding that the Constitutional requirement for a president to “faithfully execute the laws” means Trump must wield his power, on immigration and the Insurrection Act, “in good faith.”
Courts have blocked some of Trump's efforts to deploy the National Guard, but he'd argue with the Insurrection Act that he does not need a state's permission to send troops.
That traces to President Abraham Lincoln, who held in 1861 that Southern states could not legitimately secede. So, he convinced Congress to give him express power to deploy U.S. troops, without asking, into Confederate states he contended were still in the Union. Quite literally, Lincoln used the act as a legal basis to fight the Civil War.
Nunn said situations beyond such a clear insurrection as the Confederacy still require a local request or another trigger that Congress added after the Civil War: protecting individual rights. Ulysses S. Grant used that provision to send troops to counter the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists who ignored the 14th and 15th amendments and civil rights statutes.
During post-war industrialization, violence erupted around strikes and expanding immigration — and governors sought help.
President Rutherford B. Hayes granted state requests during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 after striking workers, state forces and local police clashed, leading to dozens of deaths. Grover Cleveland granted a Washington state governor's request — at that time it was a U.S. territory — to help protect Chinese citizens who were being attacked by white rioters. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to Colorado in 1914 amid a coal strike after workers were killed.
Federal troops helped diffuse each situation.
Banks stressed that the law then and now presumes that federal resources are needed only when state and local authorities are overwhelmed — and Minnesota leaders say their cities would be stable and safe if Trump's feds left.
As Grant had done, mid-20th century presidents used the act to counter white supremacists.
Franklin Roosevelt dispatched 6,000 troops to Detroit — more than double the U.S. forces in Minneapolis — after race riots that started with whites attacking Black residents. State officials asked for FDR's aid after riots escalated, in part, Nunn said, because white local law enforcement joined in violence against Black residents. Federal troops calmed the city after dozens of deaths, including 17 Black residents killed by local police.
Once the Civil Rights Movement began, presidents sent authorities to Southern states without requests or permission, because local authorities defied U.S. civil rights law and fomented violence themselves.
Dwight Eisenhower enforced integration at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy sent troops to the University of Mississippi after riots over James Meredith's admission and then pre-emptively to ensure no violence upon George Wallace's “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” to protest the University of Alabama's integration.
“There could have been significant loss of life from the rioters” in Mississippi, Nunn said.
Lyndon Johnson protected the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery after Wallace's troopers attacked marchers' on their first peaceful attempt.
Johnson also sent troops to multiple U.S. cities in 1967 and 1968 after clashes between residents and police escalated. The same thing happened in Los Angeles in 1992, the last time the Insurrection Act was invoked.
Riots erupted after a jury failed to convict four white police officers of excessive use of force despite video showing them beating a Rodney King, a Black man. California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush for support.
Bush authorized about 4,000 troops — but after he had publicly expressed displeasure over the trial verdict. He promised to “restore order” yet directed the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation, and two of the L.A. officers were later convicted in federal court.
President Donald Trump answers questions after signing a bill that returns whole milk to school cafeterias across the country, in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
