New York City prosecutors are pushing to reinstate a murder conviction in connection with the 1979 death of Etan Patz.
According to CBS News, the prosecution is in hopes that the Supreme Court will reinstate Pedro Hernandez’s conviction, although they are in the process of preparing for a retrial.
A federal appeals court overturned the murder verdict in July. In October, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Hernandez should be “retried or released,” due to unsound jury instruction.
A three-judge panel found that the New York judge overseeing Hernandez’s 2017 murder trial gave the jury improper instructions on Hernandez’s confession.
“When deliberating during his second trial, the jury sent the judge three different notes about Hernandez’s confessions,” an order in July detailed.
“The third note asked the trial court to ‘explain’ whether, if the jury found that Hernandez’s un-Mirandized confession ‘was not voluntary,’ it ‘must disregard’ the later confessions, including the videotaped confessions at the local Camden County Prosecutor’s Office (‘CCPO’) and the Manhattan District Attorney’s (‘DA’s’) Office.”
Along with flawed jury instruction, the appeal claimed that there were also issues with police interrogation and Hernandez’s mental health.
Hernandez’s attorneys claimed he was mentally ill and that he only issued a confession after seven hours of police questioning.
In November, the prosecution decided to retry Hernandez for the third time, CNN reports. However, they are hoping the Supreme Court will bypass the lengthy steps through a reinstatement.
Should the case be retried, jury selection must begin by June 1, 2026.
Hernandez, an 18-year-old bodega clerk at the time of Etan’s death, confessed to strangling the victim after luring him from a school bus stop in New York City, by promising him a soda.
Etan’s remains have never been found, and no forensic evidence has linked Hernandez to the crime.
Police initially arrested Hernandez for second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping in 2012, but his first trial in 2015 ended with a hung jury.
In 2017, a jury deliberated for nine days before convicting him of both crimes.
The Manhattan DA’s office previously said Hernandez should remain incarcerated at Clinton Correctional Facility until the Supreme Court makes its decision.
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[Feature Photo: FILE – This May 28, 2012, file photo shows a newspaper with a photograph of Etan Patz at a makeshift memorial in the SoHo neighborhood of New York where Patz lived before his disappearance on May 25, 1979. The memorial was set up near a building that housed a convenience store where Pedro Hernandez, accused of killing Patz, told police 33 years after the boy’s disappearance, that he choked the 6-year-old and put the still-living boy into a plastic bag, boxed up the bag and left it on a street. Opening statements in Hernandez’s trial are set for Friday, Jan. 30, 2015. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)]
