Supreme Court restores conviction in infamous murder of Etan Patz
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday sided with New York prosecutors and declined to invalidate the conviction of a man who confessed to killing 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979, reversing a lower court decision that likely would have required a new trial.
Patz disappeared on the morning of May 25, 1979, the first time his parents allowed him to walk by himself to his bus stop about a block away from his home in SoHo. The disappearance sparked a highly publicized search for the boy, and brought national attention to cases of missing children across the country after authorities put his image on thousands of milk cartons. His body was never found.
The investigation into his disappearance stalled until 2012 when police learned that Pedro Hernandez, who had worked at a bodega near the bus stop, told his ex-wife and others that he had strangled a boy years earlier. He repeated the confessions to law enforcement and was later convicted of felony murder and kidnaping. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Hernandez’s lawyers said his confession was false and caused by mental illness.
Hernandez filed for habeas corpus relief in federal court, challenging the way the trial judge responded to a question from the jury about his confessions. A federal district court denied the petition, but the New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and ordered Hernandez to be released or retried.
“The Second Circuit exceeded its authority in holding that Hernandez is entitled to relief,” the Supreme Court said in an unsigned opinion Monday. “The panel’s opinion appears to reflect serious doubt about the reliability of Hernandez’s confessions, but (federal law) does not allow a federal habeas court to disturb a state-court conviction based on such an evaluation of the evidence.”
The court’s three liberals — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — said they would have declined to upend a lower court’s decision. They did not explain their reasoning.
The judge’s response was “clearly wrong,” the 2nd Circuit said in its ruling, and “the error was manifestly prejudicial.” The question dealt with whether the jury “must disregard” subsequent confessions if it found that Hernandez’s confession before he was read his Miranda right was not voluntary. The judge responded that the answer was no, despite a 2004 Supreme Court holding that found similar policework unconstitutional.
Prosecutors in Manhattan appealed to the Supreme Court in December.
“Retrial may pose ‘daunting difficulties’ given that the crime here occurred nearly fifty years ago and several of the already-elderly witnesses have died since the last trial in 2016,” they told the Supreme Court in their appeal.
But attorneys for Hernandez said their client had been “wrongfully held in state custody for almost 14 years” and that the 2nd Circuit’s decision was based on the “straightforward application of this court’s precedent to the ‘extraordinary circumstances of this case.’”
New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg celebrated the ruling.
“Today the Supreme Court agreed with the findings of multiple lower courts and upheld the trial conviction of Pedro Hernandez for the horrific murder of Etan Patz, which changed a generation of New Yorkers,” Bragg said in a statement. “This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family and will continue to stand by this important conviction.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
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