By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) -A federal appeals court on Monday overturned the conviction of a former Manhattan bodega clerk found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Ethan Patz, a 6-year-old boy whose 1979 disappearance stoked national fears about missing and abducted children.
A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Pedro Hernandez, serving a prison sentence of 25 years to life, released from custody unless the state grants him a new trial within a time frame deemed “reasonable” by a federal judge.
It will be up to the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to decide whether to seek what would be a third trial in a case that dates back nearly a quarter-century and was originally brought by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance.
A spokesperson for the DA’s office, Emily Tuttle, said “we are reviewing the decision.”
In a 51-page response to a habeas petition filed on his behalf, the appellate panel sided with Hernandez in ruling that a state trial judge contradicted federal law in his instruction to jurors during their deliberations and thus swayed the verdict against the defendant.
The instruction at issue centered on the jury’s question as to how it should treat statements of confession Hernandez gave during hours of interrogation by investigators without a lawyer present.
Hernandez, now 64, was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and murdering Patz, who vanished nearly 40 years earlier as he walked alone for the first time to a school bus stop two blocks from his home in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood on May 25, 1979.
The boy, who was never found, became one of the first missing children whose faces would become ubiquitous as emblems printed on the sides of milk cartons to publicize their disappearance in hopes of stirring investigative tips.
The mystery of the Patz case captured U.S. media attention and endured as one of the country’s most infamous child disappearances until police arrested Hernandez in May 2012.
Because of a lack of physical evidence or contemporary witnesses in the case, the 2016-2017 trial – Hernandez’s second after the first ended in a hung jury in 2015 – hinged almost entirely on his purported confessions.
Hernandez, who worked in a bodega near the bus stop and was 18 at the time, told investigators he strangled the boy and then placed his body in a box left in a trash pick-up area outside the store.
His lawyers argued the admission was the result of police coercion as well as severe mental illness that altered his perceptions of reality, making him especially susceptible to confessionary delusions and hallucinations.
According to case records, Hernandez initially admitted to the crime without being advised of his so-called Miranda rights to avoid self-incrimination and to have an attorney present. Then, after he was read his rights and had agreed to waive them, he was videotaped twice making statements of confession.
On the second day of deliberations in the 2017 trial, the jury sent a note to the judge asking whether jurors must disregard the two videotaped confessions if they concluded that this initial, non-Mirandized one was involuntary.
The judge wrote back: “The answer is, no,” which the appeals court ruled was both improper and “manifestly prejudicial.” The verdict against Hernandez was returned after seven more days of deliberation.
Jurors ultimately rejected “substantial evidence” presented by the defense pointing to another man who was long considered a suspect, Jose Ramos, a convicted pedophile and boyfriend of Patz’s babysitter, according to an account of the case in the appeals court ruling.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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