Mark Geragos Responds to D.A. Hochman

Mark joined us later in the program and pushed back on Hochman ... he says Hochman is ignoring the issue at hand here -- rehabilitation.

Transcript

00:00So Nathan Hockman kind of said, sorry, not sorry, that he regretted showing that picture

00:09without warning, but said, look, that picture has been in the Netflix documentary that the

00:16Menendez brothers participated in. Everybody saw it. So it was almost a no harm, no foul

00:23type thing. What's your reaction to that? Look, Friday, I saw Anna Maria, Terry's daughter,

00:31and kind of what I consider to be, there she is, beautiful, she's self-described 50s mom.

00:38She's never seen the picture until it was flashed up on last Friday, and it greatly upset her. On

00:45Friday, her daughter said the same thing. It upset everybody in the courtroom. And by the way,

00:50the focus, as you obviously have already reported, was solely on the crime. We get it. It was a

00:58gruesome crime, a bad crime, one they regret. But that isn't the purpose of the statute. I mean,

01:05all you have to do is troll through or actually scroll through the trolls who are commenting

01:11on the TMZ page, and you will see people's focus on the crime. I get that. But this proceeding is

01:20not focused on the crime. This proceeding is, as we explain painstakingly in court, this statute is,

01:28have they rehabilitated? Everybody agrees. You won't get any argument, even from the DA, that under that

01:35standard, they should be out. They have rehabilitated. And a lot of this is just shock value,

01:40I suppose, or pandering. I mean, I said it, I said it on Friday. I really think this is just pandering to a

01:48angry, speaking of angry, contingent in the current DA's office, who's been, had a bunch of pent up demand

01:55during the Gascon administration. And this is kind of their venting, if you will, or catharsis. But it

02:02shouldn't be taken out on the victims. One of the things that Nathan Hockman said was, you know, I heard what you

02:08said about the law that says this is just about rehabilitation. Are they rehabilitated? And it

02:14sounded to me like the hurdle he can't get over is the fact that he hasn't heard the Menendez brothers

02:22admit to the lies that they told about the crime before they were convicted.

02:29There's a fundamental misunderstanding. And Nathan Hockman is not a stupid man. This is somebody who

02:35was a criminal defense lawyer, I believe, for longer than he was a prosecutor. So he understands

02:41this. And I will give him a pass that maybe he was in the federal system and he didn't do much state

02:46work. When he says self-defense, that they told lies about self-defense, there was never a self-defense

02:54instruction ever given to any of the three juries. Both brothers testified in trial number one.

03:03Both brothers testified for weeks and were cross-examined for weeks. Both brothers,

03:10after testifying for weeks and being cross-examined for weeks, both brothers' juries, half of them,

03:17in both separately, voted not guilty on murder, meaning half of them thought that their imperfect

03:26self-defense negated the murder. They have not addressed the basic elephant in the room. They

03:33spent three to three and a half hours on Friday. The one thing they never addressed, not one sentence

03:39about it, was rehabilitation. They didn't talk about the 35 years they've been in custody. They didn't

03:45talk about all of the programs. They didn't talk about all of the inmates who have lauded their

03:50development, their programs, their hospice programs. And I understand it's kind of a throwback to say,

03:56the crime was horrible, the crime was horrible. The fact remains this statute,

04:01what the law says is, have they rehabilitated themselves?