A U.S. federal appeals court overturned the 2017 murder conviction of Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega clerk found guilty of the 1979 disappearance in New York City and killing of 6-year-old Etan Patz, a case that riveted the United States at the time.
“In a shocking ruling,” a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals decided on Monday that Hernandez should be given a new trial or go free, the New York Post reported.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg must now decide whether to pursue a new trial in the case.
Etan Patz was the first child ever featured on a milk carton. Placing pictures of missing kids on such boxes became a trend in the 1980s.
Although the police put hundreds of detectives on the case, Patz’s body has never been found.
Hernandez didn’t become a suspect until 2012, when cops received a tip that he had appeared to confess during a prayer group to killing a child in New York, the Post reported.
Hernandez said he enticed Patz to the basement of his bodega near the boy’s bus stop in Manhattan by promising him a soda. He admitted strangling Etan until he went limp in a videotaped confession, the Post reported.
“Prosecutors said that Mr. Hernandez had a history of sexually abusing a family member, drug use and domestic violence,” The New York Times reported.
Hernandez was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison.
However, the appeals court ruled that the judge had improperly instructed the jury when they asked him how to deal with the fact that Hernandez confessed before he was read his Miranda rights. He then repeated his confession again after they were read.
Although the jury sent three notes to the judge about it, the judge minimized the sequence of events, the Times reported.
When the jury asked if they should disregard Hernandez’s confession, “the trial court instructed the jury, without further explanation, that ‘the answer is, no,’” the appeals court judges wrote.
The appeals court said that the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for a confession to be extracted from defendants who were not made aware of their rights, only to then be asked to repeat the confession after their rights were read.
“We conclude that the state trial court contradicted clearly established federal law and that this error was not harmless,” the appeals panel wrote in its ruling.
The confession was obtained after seven hours of questioning by the police, the Times reported. Hernandez later retracted his confession.
His lawyer at the time, Harvey Fishbein, said that Hernandez’s confession was false and “the product of psychotic hallucinations and delusions,” the Times said.
Hernandez’s first trial in 2015 ended with a hung jury. In his 2017 re-trial, he was convicted and handed the maximum sentence.
