A federal judge in New York has ruled that convicted child killer Pedro Hernandez must be retried for the 1979 murder of Etan Patz, or released from custody.
FOX News Digital reports that 64-year-old Hernandez must be retried by June 2026, Judge Colleen McMahon of Manhattan’s federal district court ruled Thursday.
A jury convicted Hernandez of murder during a 2017 retrial, in connection with the 6-year-old’s death.
As CrimeOnline previously reported, a three-judge panel found that the New York judge overseeing Hernandez’s 2017 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.
In return, prosecutors requested 90 days to determine whether they will retry Hernandez. The defense asked for the decision to be made within a month.
McMahon noted the challenges the prosecution will face to locate “dozens of long-scattered witnesses who testified at the last trial some seven years ago.”
She also noted that the prosecution is asking for the Supreme Court to review the appeals decision.
“It is not my job to read the tea leaves and make predictions or estimates about when or how the Supreme Court will act on any petition for certiorari that may be filed,” McMahon wrote.
Etan Patz Disappearance and Murder
Hernandez, an 18-year-old bodega clerk at the time, confessed in 2012 to strangling Etan inside the store’s basement.
Hernandez reportedly said he lured Etan from a school bus stop in New York City by promising him a soda. After the murder, he hid the child’s body in an alley.
Etan had been waiting by the bus stop on May 25, 1979, the first day of school, after walking from his home that morning, when he vanished.
He told his mother, Julie, that he wanted to walk alone. She later told police that she watched him from their apartment window as he crossed Wooster Street in Manhattan’s SoHo area.
Etan never made it to school and didn’t return home. His remains have never been found, and no forensic evidence has linked Hernandez to the crime.
“That was the last time I saw him. I watched him walk one block away,” Julie Patz testified during Hernandez’s murder trial. “I turned around and went back upstairs and that was the last time.”
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.
Hernandez’s attorneys claimed he was mentally ill and that he only issued a confession after seven hours of police questioning. They also said he had difficulties separating fiction from reality.
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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 they 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)]
