Supreme Court restores conviction in Etan Patz killing case

The Supreme Court restored Pedro Hernandez’s murder conviction on June 22, reversing a federal appeals court that had ordered relief in the Etan Patz case. In an unsigned 6-3 per curiam opinion in McCarthy v. Hernandez, the justices held that the Second Circuit exceeded the role that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 prescribes, and they left in place Hernandez’s 2017 conviction for felony murder and kidnapping.

Etan Patz disappeared on the morning of May 25, 1979, after leaving his family’s apartment in lower Manhattan for the walk to his bus stop in SoHo. He stopped at a bodega where Hernandez, then 18, was working and never boarded the bus. Patz was never seen alive again. His disappearance helped spur the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, put his face on milk cartons, and later led to National Missing Children’s Day.

The investigation stalled for decades before it revived in 2012, when police learned Hernandez had told his brother-in-law and others that he had strangled a boy. Detectives questioned him at the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey for about seven hours before giving Miranda warnings. Hernandez then gave multiple confessions, including videotaped statements and statements to his wife and daughter, and later a videotaped confession to a New York assistant district attorney. His lawyers said his low IQ and history of mental illness made those admissions unreliable.

The Supreme Court held the trial judge was not required to instruct the jury on Missouri v. Seibert, because there was no clearly established federal law requiring that instruction and Seibert addressed the suppression of statements, not jury deliberations. The court rejected the Second Circuit’s reasoning that the state judge’s response to a jury question about later confessions was erroneous and prejudicial. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissented without explanation.

Hernandez’s first trial ended in a mistrial, and prosecutors had been preparing to try him a third time after the Second Circuit ordered a new trial or release. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg called the lower court’s basis for reversal a “slender reed,” while defense lawyers Harvey Fishbein and Alice Fontier said they were “terribly disappointed” and maintained that an innocent man remains imprisoned.