The popularity of true crime isn't all good

By TRAVIS LOLLER

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 further appeals. But today, more than three decades later, they unexpectedly have a 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 couple brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, the Los Angeles district attorney recommended that the two be resentenced.

The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment such as the Netflix docudrama Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is leading to changes in the real lives of its 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.

However, because many of these products focus on entertainment and profit, they can also have serious negative consequences.

It could help the Menendez brothers

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FILE – Erik Menendez listens to defense attorney Leslie Abramson as she holds a photo of him as a little boy during a deposition in Los Angeles on Sept. 29, 1993. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)

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Using true crime stories to sell a product has a long history in America, from the “penny press” tabloids of the mid-19th century to made-for-TV movies like “The Burning Bed” in 1984. Nowadays, it's podcasts, addictive ones Netflix series and even true crime TikToks. The fascination with the genre may be seen as morbid by some, but it can be partly explained by the human desire to make sense of the world through stories.

In the Menendez brothers' case, Lyle, then 21, and Erik, then 18, said they feared their parents would kill them to prevent their father's longtime sexual abuse of Erik from coming to light. But at their trial, many of the sexual abuse allegations were not allowed to be presented to the jury, and prosecutors claimed they simply committed murder to get their parents' money.

For years, that was the story that many people who followed the saga from afar accepted and talked about.

“The new dramas delve into the brothers' childhood and help the public better understand the context of the crime and thus see the world as a less frightening place,” says Adam Banner, a criminal defense attorney who writes a column on pop culture and law writes The ABA Journal of the American Bar Association.

“Not only does it make us feel inherently better,” Banner says, “but it also objectively gives us the opportunity to think, ‘Well, now I can put this case in a different box than another situation where I don’t have one .'” Explanation and the only thing I can say is, 'That kid just has to be evil.'”

The rise of the anti-hero is in play

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FILE – Shamim Syed, Adnan Syed's mother, left, celebrates with others outside the Cummings Courthouse on September 19, 2022 in Baltimore after a judge ordered the release of her son Adnan Syed, overturning his conviction for a 1999 murder Hit podcast “Serial.” (AP Photo/Brian Witte, File)

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Much true crime of the past examines particularly shocking crimes in depth, generally under the assumption that those convicted of the crime were actually guilty and deserved punishment.

The success of the Serial podcast, which cast doubt on Adnan Syed's murder conviction, has 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 compassionate and therefore do not deserve their harsh punishments.

“There is a long-standing tradition of journalists picking apart criminal cases and showing that people are potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah, a fellow 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 rises exponentially after 'Serial' in 2014 and obviously changed the entire podcast landscape economically and culturally,” says Chammah. “And then 'Making a Murderer' came along a few years later and became kind of a gigantic example of that in documentaries.”

Around the same time period, the Innocence Movement, along with the Black Lives Matter movement, gained traction and increased attention to deaths in police custody. And in popular culture, both fiction and nonfiction, the trend is to dig up a villain character's backstory.

“All these superheroes, supervillains, the movie 'Joker' – you're just inundated with the idea that people's bad behavior is shaped by trauma in their youth,” Chammah said.

Banner often represents some of the least sympathetic defendants imaginable, including those accused of child sexual abuse. He says the impact of these cultural trends is real. Today's jurors are more likely to give their clients the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he also worries that current true crime focuses heavily on cases where something went wrong, which he believes are the outliers.

While the mystery aspect of “Did they do it right?” If that, he says, might pique our curiosity, we risk sowing distrust of the entire criminal justice system.

“You don’t want to take away the positive impact that bringing a case into the spotlight can bring. 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 for a case, we can save someone from death row or overturn a life sentence.”

Chammah adds: “When you open up sentencing decisions, second looks, and criminal justice policy to pop culture – in the sense of who makes a podcast about it, who gets Kim Kardashian to talk about it – the risk of extreme arbitrariness is really high.”…It seems like it’s only a matter of time before a defendant’s wealthy family essentially funds a podcast that tries to make their innocence go viral.”

The audience is also a factor

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

“Because these are not trained detectives or people who have actual expertise in forensics or even criminal law, it is very common for the wrong people to be implicated or floated as suspects,” she says. “The families of the victims are now also part of the discourse. You could accuse them of one thing or another, or at least consider the murder of a loved one, the violent death, as entertainment for millions of strangers.”

This sensitivity has been both documented and satirized in the streaming comedy-drama series “Only Murders in the Building,” about three unlikely collaborators living in a New York City apartment building where a murder has occurred. The trio decides to do a true crime podcast while trying to solve the case.

Nothing about true crime is inherently unethical, Phillips says. “It’s because the social media system – the attention economy – is not focused on ethics. It is focused on views, on engagement and on sensationalism.”

Many influencers are now vying for the “killer audience,” says Phillips, 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 kind of inevitable that you would see the collision of these two things and that these influencers would literally just put on a face and then tell something very special – it's very informal, it's very engaging, it's often not particularly well researched,” she says. “This is not investigative journalism.”

Originally published: November 4, 2024 at 12:02 pm PST

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