{"id":78568,"date":"2025-12-22T23:17:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T23:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/78568\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T23:17:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T23:17:08","slug":"nyc-prosecutors-ask-supreme-court-to-restore-conviction-in-etan-patz-child-murder-case-amnewyork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/78568\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC prosecutors ask Supreme Court to restore conviction in Etan Patz child murder case \u2013 amNewYork"},"content":{"rendered":"

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and New York City prosecutors have asked the United States Supreme Court to reinstate the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, the man who was found guilty in 2017 of murdering and kidnapping six-year-old Etan Patz in 1979.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned<\/a> Hernandez\u2019s conviction in July, with a three-judge panel finding that New York Supreme Court Judge Maxwell Wiley, who presided over Hernandez\u2019s trial, incorrectly answered a question from the jury regarding what evidence they could consider when making their decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hernandez, now 64, repeatedly confessed to police that he had kidnapped Patz while he was walking to his New York City bus stop and killed him in a SoHo basement, but Hernandez\u2019s lawyers have argued that his confession was the product of psychotic delusion \u2014 and that his first confession before police came before he was told he had the right to remain silent.<\/p>\n

During 2017 jury deliberations, Wiley told jurors that, even if they decided Hernandez didn\u2019t initially voluntarily confess before he\u2019d been read his rights, they didn\u2019t need to disregard his other subsequent confessions to police, or his statements to members of the public, like his family and friends, whom he told he\u2019d \u201cdone a bad thing and killed a child in New York,\u201d according to police reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Second Circuit disagreed, ruling that the jury should have received a fuller answer as to how federal case law requires confessions like Hernandez\u2019s to be considered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to the 2004 Supreme Court ruling in Missouri v. Seibert<\/a>, when police make a conscious choice to question a suspect first and get a confession, then read that suspect their rights and get the suspect to repeat their confession, neither confession should be considered as evidence, unless sufficient \u201ccurative measures\u201d were taken.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, the court has also ruled that as long as police didn\u2019t intentionally refrain from reading a suspect their rights before a confession, a second confession after their rights are read is admissible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The appellate judges said Wiley\u2019s instruction ran afoul of the Seibert ruling because it wasn\u2019t explanatory enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of the lack of physical evidence, the trial\u2014Hernandez\u2019s second, after the first jury hung\u2014hinged entirely on\u00a0 Hernandez\u2019s purported confessions to the crime.\u00a0 Central to the trial was whether Hernandez\u2019s confessions to law enforcement were made voluntarily, knowingly, and intelligently,\u201d the appeals court wrote in July. \u201cThe jury was not told that it could disregard those statements, or on what basis it might even be obligated to disregard them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bragg, who announced a few weeks ago that he\u2019d be retrying Hernandez\u2019s case since his conviction was overturned, argued that Hernandez\u2019s conviction should be reinstated because the federal court\u2019s invalidation of a state jury verdict \u201cflouted\u201d a law that limits when a federal court can overturn state court convictions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit\u2026ruling was not based on any error in the decades-long investigation, in the admission of Hernandez\u2019s confessions, or in the evidence presented at trial. Instead, the Second Circuit undid the conviction based on the purported inadequacy of the state trial court\u2019s response to a single jury note,\u201d Bragg\u2019s filing says. \u201cThe court of appeals\u2019 ruling \u2018plainly violated Congress\u2019s prohibition on disturbing state-court judgments on federal habeas review absent an error that lies beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The filing, which Bragg submitted with appeals division chief Steven Wu and federal habeas corpus unit chief Stephen Kress to the Supreme Court Thursday, also argues that Hernandez\u2019s confessions included \u201ccritical details he could not have known unless he were the perpetrator,\u201d and that the trial was thorough, as it stretched for five months and included 66 witnesses.<\/p>\n

Harvey Fishbein, one of Hernandez\u2019s attorneys, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He\u2019s previously said that the appeals court didn\u2019t reverse his client\u2019s conviction purely on a technical violation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He has called the conviction \u201cfundamentally flawed\u201d and emphasized that the appeals court judges said that they had \u201cgrave doubts\u201d about the validity of the confessions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been argued that Hernandez fits the profile of someone who could be prone to making false confessions and that not all of his statements matched facts of the case. Doctors have diagnosed\u00a0 Hernandez with a myriad of disorders, including psychotic disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, chronic mental illness and memory impairment, along with an incredibly low IQ that would mean he was \u201cfunctioning at the lowest level of intelligence compared to other people,\u201d court filings say.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His attorneys argued that his conditions made him \u201cespecially susceptible to confessionary hallucinations.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

When Hernandez was first questioned by police, he asked to leave multiple times, accused the officers of \u201ctrying to pin what happened to that boy on [him],\u201d spoke about seeing ghosts, seemed to not completely understand his right to an attorney and asked detectives how to spell the word \u201cchoke\u201d when writing his confession on paper, court filings show. Whether his confession was accurate, voluntary and admissible evidence was a central point of his trial.<\/p>\n

Patz\u2019s disappearance drew national attention<\/a> when his face was plastered across milk cartons during his search and police and prosecutors hit repeated dead ends, like never finding his body or any physical evidence of his disappearance that could be tied to anyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"A missing-child poster from 1979 for Etan Patz that was shown to Pedro Hernandez by police during his first confession, in Camden, N.J., in 2012. Schneps Media Archives<\/p>\n

Now more than four decades old, it has been considered one of the country\u2019s most confusing cases; a number of suspects over the years have confessed to molesting and abusing other children \u2014 but each one denied kidnapping and killing Patz.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

One notable suspect was Jose Ramos, the boyfriend of Patz\u2019s babysitter, who was arrested in 1982 after trying to lure two boys to a drainpipe. Police discovered several photographs of young boys in Ramos\u2019s personal property, including one that resembled Patz. In 1987, Ramos was convicted of indecent assault of a five-year-old boy and sentenced to three and a half to seven years in prison.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Patz\u2019s babysitter\u2019s son said Ramos had molested him, and in 1990, Ramos admitted to molesting another eight-year-old boy on more than one occasion and was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. In 1991, Ramos confessed to taking a young boy from Washington Square Park to his apartment, molesting him, and putting him on the subway on the same day as Patz\u2019s disappearance. He couldn\u2019t confirm whether the boy was Patz, but said that even if it was, he didn\u2019t kill him.<\/p>\n

Another suspect in the case was Othniel Miller, a carpenter who had done work in Patz\u2019s family\u2019s apartment and had a basement workshop between the apartment and the bus stop. Miller said Patz had been in his basement workshop the night before, helping him with carpentry in exchange for a dollar. A police dog trained to detect the odor of human decomposition picked up that scent in Miller\u2019s basement, but a dig excavating his workshop didn\u2019t turn up anything. Miller admitted to having sexual intercourse with a girl who was approximately ten years old in 1979, but never admitted any connection to Patz\u2019s disappearance and was never charged in his case.<\/p>\n

Hernandez, meanwhile, ran a bodega on the route Patz would walk to school. He was not a suspect until 2012, when his brother-in-law alerted the police to statements Hernandez was making about abusing and killing a child in New York City, after reading about the case in the news when Miller was identified as a suspect. The statements varied widely, from Hernandez saying he \u201csodomized\u201d a child to him saying he \u201cstabbed\u201d a child with a \u201cpointy stick\u201d or strangled a kid after a child threw a ball at him.<\/p>\n

Hernandez received a sentence of 25 years to life. He remains in custody in a New York State prison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and New York City prosecutors have asked the United States Supreme Court to reinstate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78569,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[419,276,2710,259,9,12,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-78568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-courts","tag-etan-patz","tag-law","tag-murder","tag-new-york","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78568","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=78568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}