In the Friday hearing, Hochman took some heat for showing old crime scene photos in front of Menendez family members ... and now he's apologizing.
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00:00A crime scene photo was shown in the courtroom. There were family members there. They were very
00:07upset. Jose Menendez's sister had a medical emergency yesterday. She was unresponsive.
00:16She's in the hospital in critical condition. Family is saying that it was triggered by showing
00:22the photo. My understanding is you have said you kind of regretted your DA showing it. I'm wondering
00:29how you feel about that. First, we wish a speedy recovery to Teresa Barrault, Jose Menendez's
00:36sister. Second, with respect to showing that photo, remember for 18 years, from 2005 to 2023,
00:45the Menendez case lay dormant legally. Nothing was happening. Then the Menendez brothers themselves
00:51reintroduced the concept of bringing their case to the foreground, both on the courts and public
00:56opinion, in order to have their case reconsidered, whether it was a habeas, clemency, or a resentencing.
01:03Then there was a Netflix documentary that the Menendez brothers participated in,
01:07in which the crime scene photos were shown over and over and over again to millions and millions
01:14and millions of people. And at no point did the Menendez family object to the crime scene photos
01:20being shown at that point. In retrospect, we should have alerted defense counsel that we were not only
01:26going to describe this absolutely brutal killing in words, but that we are also going to show for the
01:32judge's edification, because this judge had never seen that particular photo or a photograph of the
01:39crime scene, that we were going to show it for two minutes. And to the extent that we did not provide
01:43that notification to the victim family members, we've apologized. In fact, I've gone out of my way
01:50to do my best to hear from the Menendez family itself. I spent three hours personally, no DA in 35
01:57years in dealing with this case has ever spent so much time with the Menendez family, where I heard
02:03everything they had to say. It was gut-wrenching. It was actually, I mean, to hear these folks describe
02:09the pain they have gone through, both in losing it, whether it was a brother, a sister, it could have been
02:14their aunt and their uncle, or it was the 30 years that the Menendez brothers had been in incarceration,
02:22and what that has done to them, and their belief on the rehabilitation of the Menendezes.
02:27I listened to that for three hours. Everyone was invited to speak for as long as they wanted to speak,
02:33and I had no obligation as a district attorney to hear that. I could have had some person in my office
02:38listen to them, but I thought it was important enough for me, myself, to go ahead and hear that,
02:44that I gave them the time to do it.