Second Circuit overturns bodega clerk's conviction in 1979 murder of 6-year-old

MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal appeals panel on Monday overturned the 2017 conviction of the man who confessed to kidnapping and killing 6-year-old Etan Patz nearly four decades ago and ordered he get a new trial, finding a state court’s instructions to jurors had been “manifestly prejudicial” to the criminal defendant.

Etan, whose body was never found, was one of the first missing children whose profile appeared on the side of milk cartons in the 1980s.

Pedro Hernandez, who at the time was an 18-year-old worker in a corner deli in Lower Manhattan, confessed in 2012 to killing the schoolboy on May 25, 1979 — the same day the youngster vanished on his walk to school.

After Hernandez’s first trial ended in a mistrial in 2015, he was convicted at a retrial in state Supreme Court in Manhattan in 2017 and sentenced to concurrent terms of the maximum allowable sentence: 25 years to life.

On appeal, Hernandez’s lawyers had argued that the trial court’s instructions to the jury abut the voluntary nature of his confessions were improper and prejudiced the verdict.

His defense argued he had a low IQ and suffered from a psychopathology known to cause delusions, hallucinations and a distorted perception of reality, which made him particularly susceptible to confessionary hallucinations.

The Second Circuit panel concurred with Hernandez’s challenge, and instructed the lower court to grant a writ of habeas conditionally, and ordered his release unless the state of New York affords him a new trial “within a reasonable period as the district court shall set.”

“We conclude that the state trial court contradicted clearly established federal law and that this error was not harmless under the deferential standard applied to § 2254 habeas petitions. We therefore reverse and remand for the conditional granting of the writ,” Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi wrote.

According to New York City prosecutors, Hernandez confessed during an overnight interrogation that he had seen Etan standing outside the bodega and asked him if he wanted a soda. Etan agreed and followed him to the shop’s basement, where Hernandez said he “choked him” and put his body in a “garbage bag,” which he placed in a box and left in a nearby trash area, prosecutors said.

While Hernandez could not explain his motive for kidnapping and murder, he reportedly denied it was sexual.

“Despite the jury’s note seeking an ‘expla[nation]’ as to how it was to assess Hernandez’s subsequent statements, the trial court provided none,” Calabresi said. “The jury was not told that it could disregard those statements, or on what basis it might even be obligated to disregard them. Instead, the trial court, over the defense’s objections, gave the bare response of ‘no.’”

Attorneys for Herandez, 64 and serving out his sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, told Courthouse News they are pleased with the decision.

“For more than 13 years, Pedro Hernandez has been in prison for a crime he did not commit and based on a conviction that the Second Circuit has now made clear was obtained in clear violation of law," attorney Edward Diskant wrote in an email.

“We are grateful the court has now given Pedro a chance to get his life back, and I call upon the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to drop these misguided charges and focus their efforts where they belong: on finding those actually responsible for the disappearance of Etan Patz,” Diskant said.

A spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said Monday afternoon: “We are reviewing the decision.”

Calabresi, a Bill Clinton appointee, was joined in the panel by U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier, a Barack Obama appointee; and U.S. Circuit Judge Myrna Pérez, a Joe Biden appointee.

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