NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In 1989, Americans were stunned by the shotgun shooting of Jose and Kitty Menendez by their own children in their Beverly Hills mansion. Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison and lost all subsequent appeals. But today, more than three decades later, they have an unexpected chance to get out.

Not because of how the legal system works. Because of entertainment.

After two recent documentaries and scripted dramas about the duo brought renewed attention to the 35-year-old case, the Los Angeles district attorney recommended resentencing the pair.

The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment, such as Netflix’s docuseries “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez,” are influencing the issues and real-life changes in society more broadly. At their best, true crime podcasts, streaming series, and social media content can help expose injustices and wrongdoings.

However, since many of these products prioritize entertainment and profit, they can also lead to serious negative consequences.

It could help the Menendez brothers

Using true crime stories to sell a product has a long history in America, from tabloid “penny press” newspapers in the mid-1800s to television movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” The fascination with true crime TikToks may even be considered morbid by some, although this can be partly explained by the human desire to make sense of the world through stories.

In the case of the Menendez brothers, Lyle, then 21, and Erik, then 18, said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent their father’s long-term sexual abuse of Erik from being exposed. But many of the sexual abuse allegations were not allowed to be presented to the jury at their trials, and prosecutors argued that they committed murder just to get their parents’ money.

This is the story that many who have watched the saga from afar for years have accepted and talked about.

Adam Banner, a criminal defense lawyer who writes a column on popular culture and the law, says that by touching on the brothers’ childhood, the new series helps the public better understand the context of the crime and therefore see the world as a less frightening place. ABA Journal of the American Bar Association.

Banner says, “Not only does it make us feel better, but it also makes us think objectively, ‘Well, now I can take this case and put it in another situation where I don’t have any other explanation, and all I can say is, ‘This kid is bad.’ there must be someone.’”

The rise of the antihero is in effect

Many past true crimes deal with particularly shocking crimes and often delve into them with the assumption that those convicted of crimes are truly guilty and deserve to be punished.

The success of “Serial,” the podcast that cast doubt on Adnan Syed’s murder conviction, has given rise to a newer genre that often assumes (and aims to prove) the opposite. The heroes are innocent or – as in the case of the Menendez brothers – guilty but sympathetic and therefore do not deserve harsh punishments.

“There’s a long tradition of journalists picking apart criminal cases and making it seem like people are potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project and author of “Let God Sort It: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.” ”

“But after 2014’s ‘Serial,’ that curve has been increasing exponentially and has clearly changed the entire economic and cultural landscape of podcasting,” Chammah says. became a huge example of this in the docuseries a few years later.

Around the same time, the innocence movement gained traction along with the Black Lives Matter movement, and more attention was paid to deaths in police custody. And in popular culture, both fiction and non-fiction, the trend is to delve into a villainous character’s past.

“All these superheroes, villains, the ‘Joker’ movie; you get this idea that people’s bad behavior is shaped by trauma when they were young,” Chammah said.

Banner often represents some of the least sympathetic defendants imaginable, including those accused of child sexual abuse. The effects of these cultural trends are real, he says. Juries today are more likely to give their clients the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he is also concerned about the heavy focus in current true crime on cases where things go wrong, which he says are outliers.

“Did they get it right?” If he can feed our curiosity, he says, we risk sowing distrust in the entire criminal justice system.

“You don’t want to take away the positive consequences of bringing so much attention to a cause. But you also don’t want to give the impression that this is how our justice system works. “If we can get enough cameras and microphones on a case, then that’s how we can save someone from the death penalty or overturn a life sentence.”

Chammah adds: “If you open up sentencing decisions, second looks, and criminal justice policy to popular culture – in the sense of who makes podcasts about them, who gets Kim Kardashian to talk about them – the risk of extreme arbitrariness is really great. … The wealthy family of one of the defendants, their It feels like it’s only a matter of time before he finances a podcast trying to make his innocence go viral.”

The audience is also important

The genre’s popularity on social media adds another layer of complication, often encouraging active participation from viewers and listeners, says Whitney Phillips, who teaches true crime and media ethics at the University of Oregon.

“Because these are not trained detectives or people with real subject matter expertise in forensic science or even criminal law, there’s a really common outcome of the wrong people being charged as suspects or emerging as suspects,” he says. “Also, the families of the victims are now part of the discourse. They may be accused of this, that, or the other, or at least the murder of loved ones, brutally murdered, for the entertainment of millions of strangers.”

This sensibility is both chronicled and satirized in “Only Murders in the Building,” a comedy-drama series about three unlikely collaborators living in a New York apartment building where a murder has occurred. While trying to solve the case, the trio decides to make a podcast about true crime.

Nothing about true crime is fundamentally unethical, Phillips says. “The social media system – the attention economy – is not set up for ethics. “It’s tuned for views, it’s tuned for engagement, it’s tuned for sensationalism.”

Phillips says many influencers are now competing for the “murder audience,” with social media and more traditional media feeding off each other. True crime is now making its way into lifestyle content and even makeup tutorials.

“It was inevitable that you would see those two things collide and these influencers would literally just put on a face of makeup and then say something very informal, very stilted, often not particularly well researched. ” he says. “This is not investigative journalism.”