LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County prosecutor was expected to request on Thursday the resentencing of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who killed their parents in 1989, according to a person familiar with the prosecutor’s decision. That step could free the brothers from prison.

The district attorney, George Gascón, scheduled a news conference for Thursday afternoon to announce his decision.

During their trial, which was televised, the brothers said they had been sexually molested by their father and had feared for their lives. At the time, their claims were met with widespread skepticism, but now they are seen by Gascón as credible enough to warrant reconsideration by the court.

The move by the office that originally prosecuted the case to seek a resentencing could pave the way for the brothers, who are serving sentences of life without parole in a prison near San Diego, to walk free.

While the district attorney’s recommendation will carry weight, it is ultimately up to a judge to decide the brothers’ future.

The case drew renewed attention this year after Netflix released a docudrama about it, and later a documentary in which the brothers discussed the case at length in prison interviews.

The murders grabbed the nation’s attention in 1989 for their lurid nature and the wealthy social environment in which they were committed. The brothers’ initial trial in the early 1990s was one of the first to be televised nationally, a forerunner of the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, also in Los Angeles County.

The Menendez brothers had separate juries in their first trial, and a judge declared a mistrial after both juries failed to reach unanimous verdicts following weeks of deliberations. The brothers were tried again — this time without TV cameras present — and were both convicted in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison. Erik Menendez was 18 and his brother, Lyle, was 21 at the time of the murders.

At trial, prosecutors portrayed the brothers as unrepentant killers who murdered their parents with shotguns to get their hands on the family’s assets, valued at the time at $14 million (about $32 million in 2024 dollars). A spending spree by the brothers in the months between the murders and their arrest, in which they bought a Porsche car, a Rolex watch and a restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey, was presented as evidence to support that theory.

The brothers’ defense team argued that they were worried that their parents would kill them to prevent the family’s secrets from becoming public.

New evidence has come to light in recent years. A letter written by Erik Menendez months before the murders, in which he described the sexual abuse to a cousin, was brought forward by journalist Robert Rand. In addition, a 2023 documentary series on the Peacock streaming service reported allegations that Jose Menendez, a wealthy music executive, had abused a member of the boy band Menudo.