NEW YORK (AP) — A notorious 1979 missing-child case will go to trial a third time after New York prosecutors vowed Tuesday to retry the man whose murder conviction was recently overturned in the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
In a case that has long been gnarled by time and uncertainty, a new set of prosecutors now will need to bring back witnesses, elicit memories and try to persuade another jury that Pedro Hernandez lured and killed the boy as he walked to his New York City school bus stop.
“After thorough review, the district attorney has determined that the available, admissible evidence supports prosecuting” Hernandez on murder and kidnapping charges, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Sarah Marquez wrote, adding that prosecutors “are prepared to proceed.”
“We are deeply disappointed in this decision as we remain convinced that Mr. Hernandez is an innocent man. But we will be prepared for trial and will present an even stronger defense,” Hernandez’s defense lawyers Harvey Fishbein and Alice Fontier said in a statement.
Under federal court rulings, jury selection for Hernandez’s retrial must begin by June 1, or he must be released from prison.
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Hernandez, now 64, worked at a nearby corner store when Etan disappeared on May 25, 1979. It was the first day his mother let him make the roughly block-long trip to the bus stop by himself. The first-grader’s body was never found.
A photograph of Etan Patz hangs on an angel figurine, as part of a makeshift memorial in the SoHo neighborhood of New York, May 28, 2012. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
His case fueled a national focus on child disappearances and abductions. Etan was one of the first to appear on milk cartons, and his parents helped successfully advocate for a national hotline and other steps to help report and rescue vanished youngsters. The anniversary of Etan’s disappearance became National Missing Children’s Day.
The case affected parenting, as well as policing, contributing to a cultural shift toward tighter supervision of American kids.
Hernandez didn’t become a suspect until decades later, when authorities learned that he had made various, somewhat inconsistent statements to confidants over the years about having killed a child or person in New York.
Hernandez then told police in 2012 he had strangled Etan after offering him a soda and enticing him into the store basement. “Something just took over me,” Hernandez told authorities on video.
With no physical evidence, the confession was crucial. His lawyers said it was delusional, false and made under pressure from police bent on closing a decades-old case.
Hernandez had been diagnosed with a mental disorder, has a very low IQ and was on antipsychotic medication. Police questioned him for about seven hours without reading him his rights or recording the interaction — those steps were taken only after, according to police, he implicated himself for the first time.
Hernandez’s first trial ended in a hung jury, because of one member’s misgivings about the defendant’s mental health and hourslong police questioning. Hernandez was convicted at a 2017 retrial and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He is now 64.
A federal appeals court ruled in July that his conviction was tainted by a judge’s “clearly wrong” response to a 2017 jury question about Hernandez’s confessions.
The question was whether jurors had to disregard Hernandez’s recorded confessions if they concluded the first, unrecorded admissions were coerced. The jury was told the answer was simply “no.”
It should have been “maybe,” with an explanation of options and legal principles for assessing such situations, the appeals judges said. They ordered his release unless his retrial begins “within a reasonable period,” leaving a lower court judge to specify how long. She then set the deadline at June 1.
