Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón has recommended that a judge resentence Lyle and Erik Menendez almost three decades after the brothers were sentenced to life without parole for murdering their parents.

The brothers were convicted in 1996 of first-degree murder for the 1989 killings of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez. If a judge approves the recommendation, it would make them eligible for immediate parole. Gascón said he believed the brothers have “paid their debt to society.” If a parole board agrees, they could soon be released from prison.

These extraordinary developments come in the wake of two true crime productions on Netflix: the scripted limited series, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, and the documentary, The Menendez Brothers. Both revivify the defence strategy used in the brothers’ 1994 and 1996 trials that they murdered their parents as a form of self-defence following years of alleged sexual abuse by their father.

In these two productions, we see the moral conundrum of so-called “true crime” on full display. That is, whose definition of “true” should viewers rely on when assessing the veracity of a narrative?

More often than not, there are two kinds of truth. There’s what really happened, and the narrative of what happened. This is a reality that I’ve noted as a criminologist and forensic historian and a police detective before that.

As a form of historical revisionism, true crime has shown both the willingness and ability to change official narratives, for better or worse.

The true crime genre has taken off in recent decades, with countless podcasts, documentaries and TV series produced recounting gruesome and often unsolved murders. The genre has garnered criticism for focusing on, and sometimes,........

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