NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — In 1989, Americans were riveted by the shotgun 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 an unexpected chance to get out.

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

After two recent documentaries and a scripted drama about the pair brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, Los Angeles the district attorney recommended to be condemned.

The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment such as the Netflix docudrama “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez” effect real-life change for their subjects and wider society. At their best, 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.

Using true crime stories to sell a product has a long history in America, from the “penny press” tabloid newspapers of the mid-1800s to television movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” These days there are podcasts, series Netflix bingeable and even true crime TikToks The fascination with the genre may be considered morbid by some, but it can be partially explained by the human desire to make sense of the world. stories.

In the case of the Menendez brothers, Lylethen 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 molestation of Erik. But at their trial, many of the allegations of sexual abuse were not allowed to be presented to the jury, and prosecutors argued that they committed murder simply to get their parents’ money.

For years, this is the story that many people who followed the saga from afar 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 attorney who writes a column on pop culture and the law for the ABA Journal of the American Bar Association.

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

Many true crimes of the past take particularly shocking crimes and explore them in depth, generally assuming that those convicted of the crime were in fact guilty and deserved to be punished.

Podcast Success” Serial”, which questioned the murder conviction of Adnan Syedit has spawned a newer 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 likable and therefore undeserving of harsh sentences.

“There’s a long tradition of journalists doing criminal cases and showing that people are potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah, a writer 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 goes up exponentially after ‘Serial,’ which was in 2014 and obviously changed the whole economic and cultural landscape of podcasts,” says Chammah. “And then ‘Making a Murderer’ came along a few years later and became kind of a huge docuseries example.”

Around the same time, the innocence movement gained traction along with the Black Lives Matter movement and increased attention to deaths in police custody. And in popular culture, both fiction and non-fiction, the trend is to explore the backstory of a villainous character.

“All these superheroes, super-villains, the ‘Joker’ movie — you’re just inundated with the 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 today’s true crime heavy focus on cases gone wrong, which he says are outliers.