The popularity of true crime brings real change for the suspects and society. It’s not all good

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — In 1989, Americans were fascinated 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 thirty years later, they unexpectedly have a chance to get out.

Not because of the operation of the legal system. 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 case public prosecutor recommended they are condemned.

The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment such as Netflix’s docudrama “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez” brings about real-life changes for their subjects and in society more broadly. At their best, true crime podcasts, streaming series, and social media content can help expose injustice 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” newspapers of the mid-19th century to television movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” Today it’s podcasts, bingeable Netflix series and even true crime TikToks The fascination with the genre may be considered morbid by some, but can be partially explained by the human desire to understand the world through stories.

In the case of the Menendez brothers: Lylewho was 21 at the time, and Erik, then 18, have said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the revelation of the father’s long-term sexual abuse of Erik. But during their trial, many of the sexual abuse allegations were not allowed to be presented to the jury, and prosecutors claimed they committed murder just to get their parents’ money.

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

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

“Not only does that make us feel intrinsically better,” says Banner, “but it also objectively gives us the ability to think, ‘Now I can put this thing in a different bucket than another situation where I don’t have to explain and all I can say is, “This kid must just be bad.”

Many true crimes of the past delve into particularly shocking crimes, usually under the assumption that those convicted of the crime were actually guilty and deserved to be punished.

The success of the podcast “ Serial”, which casts doubt on the murder conviction of Adnan Syedhas spawned a newer genre that often assumes (and sets out to prove) the opposite. The protagonists are innocent, or – as in the case of the Menendez brothers – guilty but sympathetic, and thus do not deserve their harsh punishments.

“There’s an old tradition of journalists taking apart 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 is rising exponentially in the wake of ‘Serial,’ which was in 2014 and clearly changed the entire landscape of podcasts economically and culturally,” Chammah says. “And then you have ‘Making a Murderer.’ years later and became a kind of colossal example of this in docuseries.

Around the same time period, 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 mine the backstory of an evil character.

“All these superheroes, supervillains, the movie ‘Joker’ — 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. Juries today are more likely to give his clients the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he also worries about the intense focus in current true crime on cases where things have gone wrong, which he believes are the outliers.