{"id":2366,"date":"2025-10-14T21:16:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T21:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/2366\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T21:16:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T21:16:25","slug":"etan-patz-case-hearing-held-in-manhattan-for-pedro-hernandez-after-murder-conviction-overturned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/2366\/","title":{"rendered":"Etan Patz case: Hearing held in Manhattan for Pedro Hernandez after murder conviction overturned"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (WABC) — A hearing was held Tuesday on the future of Pedro Hernandez whose conviction was overturned<\/a> last July in the 1979 murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz.<\/p>\n

The federal judge said she needs a few more days to decide whether the now 64-year-old should be released from prison or should be given a new trial date.<\/p>\n

She referred to the crime as a nightmare dating back nearly 50 years.<\/p>\n

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office wants Hernandez to stay behind bars at Clinton Correctional Facility until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear its case to restore the conviction.<\/p>\n

But Hernandez’s lawyers say he should be freed unless prosecutors set a new trial date within a “reasonable” amount of time.<\/p>\n

“The second circuit did not make its decision on a technicality here, but found that there was an error made at the trial, which meant that an innocent person was convicted, that trial is set aside, and we want one of two things, for there to be another trial or more importantly, we urge the district attorney’s office to make a decision to not retry for a third time Pedro Hernandez,” defense attorney Harvey Fishbein said.<\/p>\n

Hernandez’s first trial in 2015 ended up in a hung jury. But he was retried in 2017 and convicted of kidnapping and murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.<\/p>\n

Then this summer the verdict was surprisingly vacated on the grounds of improper jury instructions.<\/p>\n

Hernandez was a teenager working at a convenience shop in Etan’s downtown Manhattan neighborhood when the boy vanished. Police met him while canvassing the area but didn’t suspect him until they got a 2012 tip that he’d made remarks years earlier about having killed a child in New York, not mentioning Etan’s name.<\/p>\n

Etan’s case contributed to an era of fear among American families, making anxious parents more protective of kids who had been allowed to roam and play unsupervised in their neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

The Patzs’ advocacy helped establish a national missing-children hotline and made it easier for law enforcement agencies to share information about such cases. The May 25 anniversary of Etan’s disappearance became National Missing Children’s Day.<\/p>\n

(Some information from the Associated Press)<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2025 WABC-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (WABC) — A hearing was held Tuesday on the future of Pedro Hernandez whose conviction was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[2980,2978,2975,2976,276,2979,2977,75,84,83,9,24,63,2972,2974,2973],"class_list":["post-2366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-2980","tag-appeal","tag-appeals-court","tag-conviction","tag-etan-patz","tag-hearing","tag-kidnapping","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-pedro-hernandez","tag-retrial","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}