NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — In 1989, Americans were fascinated by shooting murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion by their own children. Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison and lost all subsequent appeals. But today, more than three decades later, they have, against all odds, a chance to survive.

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

After two recent documentaries and a scripted drama about the couple brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, the Los Angeles the prosecutor recommended they will be felt.

The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment like the Netflix docudrama “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez” brings about real changes in the lives of their subjects and in society in general. At their best, true-crime podcasts, streaming series, and social media content can help expose injustices and right wrongs.

But because many of these products prioritize entertainment and profit, they can also have serious negative consequences.

This could help the Menendez brothers

Using true detective stories to sell a product has a long history in America, from the “Penny Press” tabloid newspapers of the mid-1800s to TV movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” it’s podcasts, bingeable Netflix series, and even TikToks about true crime. Fascination with the genre may be considered morbid by some, but it can be explained in part by the human desire to make sense of the world through stories.

In the case of the Menendez brothers, Lylewho was then 21, and Erik, then 18, said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent disclosure of the father’s long-term sexual abuse of Erik. But at their trial, many allegations of sexual abuse were not presented to the jury, and prosecutors argued they committed murder simply to get their parents’ money.

For years, this was the story that many people who watched the saga from a distance accepted and talked about.

The new dramas delve into the brothers’ childhoods, helping audiences better understand the context of the crime and thus see the world as a less scary place, says Adam Banner, a criminal lawyer who writes a column on pop culture and law for ABA Journal of the American Bar Association.

“Not only does it make us feel better intrinsically,” Banner says, “but it also objectively gives us the ability to think, ‘Well, now I can take this thing and put it in a different context than another situation where I have no chance.” explanation and the only thing I can say is, “This kid must just be mean.” »

The rise of the antihero is at stake

Much of True Crime Past takes particularly shocking crimes and explores them in depth, usually with the premise that the people convicted of that crime were actually guilty and deserved to be punished.

The success of the podcast » In series“, which casts doubt on conviction for murder of Adnan Syedhas given rise to a more recent genre that often assumes (and intends to prove) the opposite. The protagonists are innocent or – as in the case of the Menendez brothers – guilty but sympathetic and therefore do not deserve heavy sentences.

“There’s an old tradition of journalists looking at criminal cases and showing that people are potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah, editor at the Marshall Project and author of “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty “. .”

“But I think the curve is increasing exponentially in the wake of ‘Serial,’ which was from 2014 and obviously changed the entire economic and cultural landscape of podcasts,” Chammah says. “And then ‘Making a Murderer’ came along a few years later and became sort of a giant example in docuseries.

Around the same time, the innocence movement gained ground, alongside the Black Lives Matter movement and greater attention to deaths in police custody. And in popular culture, both fiction and non-fiction, the tendency is to exploit the story of a villainous character.

“All these superheroes, these supervillains, the movie ‘Joker’ — you’re just inundated with this idea that people’s bad behavior is shaped by trauma when they were younger,” Chammah said.

Banner often represents some of the least sympathetic defendants imaginable, including those accused of child sexual abuse. He says the effects of these cultural trends are real. Today’s juries are more likely to give their clients the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he also worries about the emphasis in today’s true crime on cases where things have gone wrong, which he says are outliers.

While the puzzle aspect of “Did they do it right?” If we feed our curiosity, he says, we run the risk of sowing distrust in the entire criminal justice system.

“You don’t want to take away the positive ramifications that putting a case in the spotlight can bring. But we should also not give the impression that this is how our justice system works. If we can get enough cameras and microphones on a case, that’s how we’re going to save someone from death row or that’s how we’re going to get a life sentence overturned.

Chammah adds: “If you open up sentencing decisions, second glances and criminal justice policy to pop culture – in the sense of who gets a podcast made about them, who gets Kim Kardashian talking – the risk of extreme arbitrariness is truly great. … Looks like it’s only a matter of time before a defendant’s wealthy family funds a podcast aimed at making their innocence go viral.”

The public is also a factor

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

“As these are not qualified detectives or people with real expertise in forensics or even criminal law, then very often the wrong people are involved or named as suspects,” she says. “In addition, the families of the victims are now part of the discourse. They could be accused of this, that or that, or at the very least, the murder of their loved one, their violent death, the entertainment of millions of strangers.

This sensibility has been both chronicled and ridiculed in the streaming comedy-drama series. “Only murders in the building” which follows three unlikely collaborators who live in a New York apartment building where a murder has taken place. The trio decide to create a true crime podcast while simultaneously trying to solve the case.

Nothing about true crime is inherently unethical, Phillips says. “It’s that the social media system – the attention economy – is not calibrated for ethics. It’s calibrated for views, it’s calibrated for engagement and it’s calibrated for sensationalism.

Many influencers now compete for the “murder audience,” Phillips says, with social media and more traditional media feeding off each other. True crime is now seeping into lifestyle content and even makeup tutorials.

“It was sort of inevitable that you would see the collision of these two things and these influencers would literally just put on makeup and then kind of narrate – it’s very informal, it’s very flat, it’s not often not particularly well researched,” she says. “It’s not investigative journalism.”