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Thread: Pedro Hernandez Gets 25 Years to Life in 1979 NY Slaying of Six-Year-Old Etan Patz

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    Pedro Hernandez Gets 25 Years to Life in 1979 NY Slaying of Six-Year-Old Etan Patz




    Pedro Hernandez


    Judge says confession admissible in Etan Patz case

    New York (CNN) -- A jury will be allowed to consider a confession by a suspect with a low IQ who is accused of killing a 6-year-old boy more than three decades ago, a judge ruled Monday.

    In May 2012, Pedro Hernandez told police that he choked Etan Patz to death in New York City in 1979, police say.

    Hernandez's attorney, Harvey Fishbein, argued that his client falsely confessed and the statements were not reliable because Hernandez had been repeatedly diagnosed with schizophrenia and has an "IQ in the borderline-to-mild mental retardation range."

    The statements in question were made during three events across two days in May 2012: a 7½-hour interrogation, a 20-minute videotape of the statement following the interrogation, and a statement made at the district attorney's office the next morning, Fishbein said.

    "I think anyone who sees these confessions will understand that when the police were finished, Mr. Hernandez believed he had killed Etan Patz. But that doesn't mean he actually did and that's the whole point of this case," Fishbein told CNN affiliate NY1.

    But Judge Maxwell Wiley ruled Monday that the confession was admissible, writing that Hernandez's waiver of Miranda rights was "knowing and intelligent," according to court documents.

    Wiley cited reports of two forensic psychology experts who met with Hernandez and determined he was "in fact capable of knowingly waiving his rights," the decision said.

    The two experts agreed that "although the defendant has a very low IQ, that alone does not necessarily prevent a person from understanding Miranda warnings and making a knowing and intelligent waiver of his rights," court documents said.

    Hernandez admitted to luring Etan, who was en route to a school bus stop, into the basement of a bodega where he worked as a stock clerk and killing him, according to police. The boy's body was put in a garbage bag and thrown away, Hernandez allegedly told authorities. The remains were never found.

    The Patz case garnered national attention after the boy went missing, and his picture was plastered on thousands of milk cartons around the country.

    Fishbein told CNN that although the jury will be able to consider the confession, it is now up to them to decide if it is truly reliable or not.

    In November 2012, a grand jury indicted Hernandez on second-degree murder and kidnapping charges. He pleaded not guilty in court the following month.

    The trial is set to begin January 5, Fishbein said.

    http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/24/justic...iref=obnetwork

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    Jury in Etan Patz Trial Tells Judge It Is Deadlocked

    By JAMES C. McKINLEY, Jr.
    The New York Times

    A Manhattan jury deciding the fate of a man accused of murdering Etan Patz informed a judge in a note on Wednesday — its 11th day of deliberations — that it was unable to reach a verdict, raising the possibility that the trial would not resolve a child-abduction case that has haunted New York City for decades.

    The note, sent out just before 1 p.m., said jurors “want to let the court know we are unable to reach unanimous decision.”

    Justice Maxwell Wiley of State Supreme Court directed the jury of seven men and five women to keep deliberating. “Given the nature of this case, I don’t think you have considered this case long enough to conclude you cannot reach a verdict,” Justice Wiley said as the weary, sober-faced jurors listened.

    Lawyers for the defendant, Pedro Hernandez, 54, moved for a mistrial, arguing that the jury had clearly reached an impasse and that the judge’s instruction to keep trying amounted to coercion. Justice Wiley denied the motion.

    “They have reached a dead end,” the lead defense lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, said outside court. “The fact they can’t render a verdict at this point tells me they can’t do it, and to try to coerce them into it after 10 days is wrong.”

    Earlier in the day, jurors had asked to hear the closing arguments in the case a second time, a signal their talks had stalled.

    Shortly after the judge urged the panel to continue talking, the jurors returned to their windowless room and, over lunch, sent out a note affirming their desire to rehear the summations, complete with a PowerPoint demonstration the prosecution had used as well as photographs and videos the defense had displayed.

    Justice Wiley dismissed the jurors for the day at 2:40 p.m., saying there was no time left in the afternoon to set up the courtroom for the audio-visual exhibits. The reading of the closing statements would start on Thursday, he said.

    “Just try to clear your heads,” he said.

    The deadlock was the latest twist in protracted deliberations, which started late on the afternoon of April 15. The jurors have asked to rehear days of testimony from eight witnesses. They even requested a spreadsheet program to help organize their thoughts.

    The case turns on Mr. Hernandez’s confession to the police 33 years after Etan vanished. The question facing jurors is simple: Did Mr. Hernandez tell the truth when he told the police in May 2012 that he had strangled the 6-year-old boy in the basement of a SoHo store three decades earlier?

    Defense lawyers have argued that the confession was a fiction invented by a weak and suggestible mind under police pressure. They presented expert witnesses who said Mr. Hernandez, a disabled factory worker from Maple Shade, N.J., has low intelligence scores and a personality disorder that causes him to confuse reality and fantasy.

    Etan disappeared on May 25, 1979, while walking from his parents’ loft on Prince Street to a school bus stop two blocks away. His mother, Julie Patz, testified that she last saw her blond-haired boy headed for a bodega at Prince and West Broadway. He had a dollar in his hand to buy a soda, she said.

    At the time, Mr. Hernandez worked as a clerk at the bodega. He told the police and a prosecutor in videotaped statements that he had lured Etan into the basement of the store with the promise of a soda, then strangled him. He said he put the body in a box and left it with some trash in a subterranean alleyway near a fruit stand a block and a half away.

    Because Etan’s body and belongings were never found, the prosecution has no physical evidence linking Mr. Hernandez to the crime and little to corroborate that a murder was committed.

    During her summation, the prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, emphasized that Mr. Hernandez had given partial confessions to friends in the past. Witnesses testified he first gave an account of the crime to members of a prayer circle in 1979, saying he had strangled a child after trying to abuse him in a New York City bodega where he worked.

    Complicating matters for the jury, the defense also presented evidence pointing to a different man as a possible suspect: Jose A. Ramos, a convicted child molester who knew a woman who worked for the Patz family and was the prime suspect for years.

    A hung jury would leave unresolved a missing-child investigation that bedeviled the city police for decades and led to reforms in the way law enforcement authorities track child abductions.

    “We are prepared to try this case again,” Mr. Fishbein said. “The district attorney’s office will have to make a decision as to whether they want to retry this case.”

    Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said, “This is a conscientious and hard-working jury, and we have every faith that, under the judge’s guidance, they can continue to work together to reach a just verdict”.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/ny...rial-jury.html

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    Jury in Etan Patz Trial Again Says It Is Deadlocked

    By JAMES C. McKINLEY, Jr.
    The New York Times

    The jury in the Etan Patz murder trial ended its 15th day of deliberations on Tuesday without reaching a verdict, after sending a note to the judge earlier in the day saying it was deadlocked.

    It was the second time that the jury had reported that it was at an impasse during three weeks of intense talks, increasing the possibility that the closely watched trial would end with a hung jury and leave one of the most infamous crimes in the city’s history unresolved.

    As he did in the earlier instance, Justice Maxwell Wiley of State Supreme Court in Manhattan directed the jurors to continue deliberating, urging them not to worry about the possibility their decision might be scrutinized and second-guessed because Etan’s disappearance was a high-profile crime.

    The latest note from the jury of seven men and five women was sent to Justice Wiley at 12:20 p.m. on Tuesday. It was the jury’s first communication with the judge since Monday morning. “We the jury would like the court to know that after serious, significant and thorough deliberations we remain unable to reach a unanimous decision,” the note read.

    The defense moved for a mistrial, but Justice Wiley denied the motion. A few minutes later, the judge called the jurors into the courtroom and urged them to keep trying. “Only 12 people in this world have listened to and seen all the evidence in this case,” he said. “Those 12 people are you.”

    The jurors, appearing weary and glum, then returned to the jury room, where they had lunch and then deliberated the rest of Tuesday afternoon, before being released for the day at 5 p.m. They are to resume deliberations at 9:45 a.m. on Wednesday.

    Pedro Hernandez, a disabled factory worker from New Jersey, is charged with kidnapping and murdering Etan, who was 6 years old when he disappeared while walking to a school bus stop in SoHo on May 25, 1979.

    The trial has turned on a confession Mr. Hernandez gave to the police and later a prosecutor in May 2012, 33 years after Etan went missing, an admission that the prosecution has argued proves his guilt and that the defense has called a fiction invented under police pressure by a man with a low intelligence score and other mental problems.

    Because Etan’s body was never found, the prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on Mr. Hernandez’s own words in videotaped statements to the police, a prosecutor and to several psychiatrists who examined him while he was in state custody.

    Complicating matters for the jury, the defense also presented evidence pointing to another possible culprit: Jose A. Ramos, a convicted child molester who for years was a prime suspect in the case.

    After the jury said on Tuesday that it was deadlocked, the judge delivered what is known as an Allen charge, reminding the panel that the law did not require them to reach a verdict, nor did it require them to violate their conscience and give in to pressure from other jurors.

    But he then advised them to keep talking and to ignore the attention the trial has received in the press. “It’s safe to say your verdict will be second-guessed publicly by any number of people, but please don’t be concerned with that,” he said.

    Before the jury entered, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, the lead prosecutor, objected to the judge’s choice of words, saying his Allen charge gave the jurors the impression that any verdict was better than no verdict.

    Mr. Hernandez’s lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, argued that ordering the jury to continue deliberations after they had declared themselves deadlocked twice amounted to coercion. He said the jury was hung and the judge should declare a mistrial.

    But Justice Wiley disagreed. He said ordering the jury to keep going made sense, given the complex nature of the trial.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/ny...rial-jury.html

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    Mistrial Is Declared in Etan Patz Case

    By JAMES C. McKINLEY, Jr.
    The New York Times

    A judge declared a mistrial in the Etan Patz case on Friday after jurors said for a third time that they could not reach a verdict despite three weeks of deliberation, leaving unresolved a missing-child case that has vexed New York City for decades.

    The jury of seven men and five women said they were firmly deadlocked in deciding the fate of Pedro Hernandez, 54, a disabled factory worker from New Jersey. The murder trial, in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, turned on a confession Mr. Hernandez gave 33 years after Etan, who was 6, vanished in 1979 while walking to a school bus stop in SoHo. The prosecution said the admission proved his guilt; the defense called it a fiction invented under pressure from the police.

    The hung jury left unresolved an investigation that bedeviled the New York police for decades and led to major reforms in the way the authorities around the country track child abduction.

    It also extended the uncertainty that year after year has tortured the Patz family since May 25, 1979, when their son, wearing a pilot’s cap and carrying a small bag full of toy cars, disappeared on the way to school. Etan’s mother, Julie Patz, testified that it was the first day she had allowed her son to walk to the bus stop alone, and in no small measure, her nightmarish story came to embody the worst fears of American parents. Etan’s picture was one of the first to appear on a milk carton.

    Justice Maxwell Wiley’s decision to declare a mistrial came after jurors sent a note at 2:50 p.m. on Friday saying they were still deadlocked after nearly three weeks of deliberations. “We the jury inform the court that we are unable to reach a unanimous decision,” the note said.

    It was the third time the jury had reported it could not reach a verdict; previously, Justice Wiley ordered jurors to keep deliberating. On Friday, after jurors again reached an impasse, he said, “I think at this point I would have to call the deliberations at an end and dismiss them.”

    The mistrial leaves District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. with a hard decision: Either pursue another costly trial with the same evidence that failed to convince the first jury or allow a man who confessed to murdering a child to go free. After the mistrial, Mr. Vance issued a statement saying he believed Mr. Hernandez was guilty, but did not indicate whether he intended to retry him.

    Etan’s father, Stanley, told reporters after the judge made his decision that he firmly believed that Mr. Hernandez had killed his son and he wanted prosecutors to try him again. “I don’t understand why the jurors couldn’t come to a verdict, but I am convinced,” Mr. Patz said. “This man did it. He said it. How many times does a man have to confess before you believe him and it’s not a hallucination?”

    In the years after Etan’s disappearance, Ms. Patz and her husband spearheaded a political movement to raise awareness about missing children and lobbied for laws that created a national legal framework for such cases.

    In 1982, after hearing testimony from Ms. Patz and other parents, Congress passed a law enabling the Federal Bureau of Investigation to better track cases of missing children. The next year, President Ronald Reagan chose the anniversary of Etan’s disappearance as National Missing Children’s Day.

    More than 50 witnesses testified in the four-month trial, including people who said that Mr. Hernandez had talked to them in the past about having killed a child and mental health experts who examined Mr. Hernandez to determine if he had given a false confession.

    The deliberations were unusually protracted and complex. The jurors asked to rehear days of testimony from eight witnesses and even had the closing arguments read back to them. They requested a spreadsheet program and a printer to organize their thoughts and asked to see all 200 pieces of evidence submitted in the trial.

    Because Etan’s body was never found, the prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on Mr. Hernandez’s own words in videotaped confessions he gave to the police, a prosecutor and several psychiatrists who examined him while he was in state custody.

    Prosecutors had no scientific evidence from a crime scene or an autopsy to buttress Mr. Hernandez’s account. Investigators never found the boy’s clothes or the pilot’s hat he was wearing, nor a small tote bag crammed with toy cars and pencils that he carried.

    Etan disappeared while walking from his parents’ loft on Prince Street to a school bus stop two blocks away. His mother testified she last saw her blond boy headed for a bodega at Prince Street and West Broadway. He had a dollar in his hand to buy a soda, she said.

    That year, Mr. Hernandez, then an 18-year-old high school dropout, worked as a stock clerk at the store, where his brother-in-law was a cashier. In videotaped statements, he told the police and a prosecutor that he lured Etan into the bodega’s basement with the promise of a soda and strangled him there. Mr. Hernandez gave no reason for his act, other than his fear Etan would tell the authorities that Mr. Hernandez had tried to hurt him. “I did it and I’m sorry I did it,” he said.

    “I tried to let go but my body was shaking and jumping,” he added. “Something took over me and I squeezed him more and more.”

    Then, he said, he wrapped the boy’s diminutive body in a plastic garbage bag and a box. He carried the box out of the basement and walked a block and a half, leaving it in a subterranean passageway between two buildings on Thompson Street, he said.

    The police did not arrest Mr. Hernandez until May 2012, when one of his brothers-in-law informed detectives that Mr. Hernandez had spoken of killing a child to a prayer group and to his former wife. Mr. Hernandez broke down in tears and said he had killed Etan after a six-and-a-half hour interrogation by three New York detectives in a cramped room at the Camden County prosecutor’s office in New Jersey, which the police did not record. A few hours later, Mr. Hernandez led investigators to a spot in SoHo where he said he had left the body.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/ny...rial.html?_r=0

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    Jurors in the Etan Patz case discussing their deliberations at a news conference on Friday. Seated are Adam Sirois, left, and Christopher Giliberti. Mr. Sirois voted to acquit Pedro Hernandez.


    In the Jury Room, 18 Days of Debate and Disagreement End in a Frustrating Mistrial

    By COLIN MOYNIHAN and JAMES C. McKINLEY, Jr.
    The New York Times

    It was just before 1 p.m. on Friday when 11 jurors who were part of one of the longest deliberations in recent years gave up any hope of swaying the 12th person on the panel.

    For 18 days, the jurors had sat elbow to elbow around a rectangular table inside the State Supreme Court building in Lower Manhattan, trying to reach consensus on whether a man committed a notorious crime: the abduction and murder in 1979 of a 6-year-old boy, Etan Patz, who vanished while walking from his family’s SoHo loft to a school bus stop two blocks away.

    The defendant, Pedro Hernandez, 54, had confessed to killing Etan almost 33 years after he disappeared, but there was no physical evidence tying him to the crime. Defense lawyers argued that the confession, which he repeated later to a prosecutor, was a fiction made up under police pressure by a man with a low I.Q. and a personality disorder clouding his ability to tell fact from fantasy.

    On Friday morning the jurors found themselves focusing again on what many had considered one of the most damning bits of evidence against Mr. Hernandez: that he had provided physical details of a passageway on Thompson Street where he said he had dumped Etan’s body. They listed possible explanations for that knowledge on a small whiteboard.

    While 11 jurors saw the passageway descriptions as bolstering Mr. Hernandez’s confession, the 12th, according to accounts provided by several people present, thought there could be an innocuous reason for the detailed memories.

    “That is when we knew it was over,” said one juror, Christopher Giliberti. “He had a verdict that he wanted to reach and it was agnostic of the evidence.”

    But the holdout juror, Adam Sirois, said he had arrived at the only conclusion he believed possible.

    “You can easily debunk the vast majority of the evidence that was presented in the case, I would say all of the evidence,” Mr. Sirois said in an interview on Saturday. “There was no real firm, corroborating evidence.”

    The trial, which began in January, included testimony from medical experts, detectives, a former federal prosecutor and Etan’s childhood best friend, all seeking to unravel a horrifying case that led to a sea change in the way American parents thought about their children’s safety. In the end, with the jury deadlocked, the judge declared a mistrial. Mr. Sirois was convinced he had acted on principle, but other jurors believed his views were so strong and so singular that they began imagining three theories of the case: the prosecution’s, the defense’s and Mr. Sirois’s.

    On Friday evening and Saturday morning, eight jurors spoke at length with reporters for The New York Times. They provided a detailed account of their deliberations, including the ebb and flow of debates, flaring disagreements and what slowly but certainly turned into a hardening fault line of frustration, separating Mr. Sirois from several other outspoken members of the jury and resulting in an insurmountable impasse.

    Any 11 to 1 division among jurors is bound to produce disagreements, but the account of deliberations in the Etan Patz case shed light on a process that is usually hidden and illustrated the difficulty jurors can have in reaching consensus even when a significant majority are in agreement.

    From the start, Mr. Sirois, a behavioral health specialist who works as a consultant for aid groups, emerged as the strongest voice for acquittal.

    Other jurors said they thought Mr. Sirois was distrustful of the detectives in the case, sometimes citing recent examples of police misconduct.

    Mr. Sirois acknowledged he was more skeptical than other jurors of the police handling of the interview that led to the confession, noting most of it was not recorded and that the police misrepresented some of Mr. Hernandez’s actual words in their written account of his statement. He also found compelling the expert testimony that Mr. Hernandez was susceptible to making a false confession.

    “I do think someone who is mentally compromised and weak could crack under pressure,” he said. “I do think that’s possible.”

    Sometimes, while challenging the narrative presented by the prosecution, Mr. Sirois suggested alternatives that other jurors said seemed far-fetched. “He would come up with theories that the defense didn’t even bring up,” said Alia Dahhan, the jury’s forewoman.

    “Most of the people in that room thanked me for making them think,” Mr. Sirois countered. “I didn’t introduce anything that was outside the realm of possibility.”

    Sometimes, jurors said, Mr. Sirois would briefly raise his voice. Others got upset, too. Jurors first told the judge in the case that they were at an impasse on April 29, when there were three votes for acquittal. Justice Maxwell Wiley ordered them to keep deliberating.

    Two men, including Mr. Sirois, were still convinced that Mr. Hernandez should not be convicted. On May 5, the jurors again told Judge Wiley that they could not agree. Again he ordered them to continue.

    Another juror, Cynthia Cueto, said the pro-conviction faction tried to persuade the last two holdouts, identified as Mr. Sirois and Douglas Hitchner. “We banded together,” Ms. Cueto said. “We thought we might have a chance.”

    On Friday, in an emotional moment, Mr. Hitchner switched his vote to conviction, saying that he had slept on the facts and had become persuaded that the evidence of guilt was beyond a reasonable doubt, jurors said.

    That left Mr. Sirois. The jurors discussed a videotaped walk that Mr. Hernandez had taken with detectives in May 2012, hours after he first confessed. He led detectives to a subterranean alleyway on Thompson Street, where he said he had left Etan’s body in a box.

    For some jurors, the tape was proof Mr. Hernandez was telling the truth. “The cops can’t implant that in his head,” Joan M. Brooks said. “Pedro was leading the walk.”

    Explanations for that familiarity went on a whiteboard: Mr. Hernandez remembered the details of the alleyway and basement because he had committed a life-altering crime there; the details were retained from incidental travels through the neighborhood; Pedro had learned details from the police during the interrogation.

    To Mr. Sirois it seemed possible that Mr. Hernandez had remembered the passageway and used it to complete his fictional story. “I was definitely looking for stronger evidence to corroborate the words of Mr. Hernandez himself,” he said.

    After the mistrial, several jurors said they felt devastated. Jennifer O’Connor, sitting in a hotel near the courthouse on Friday night with five other jurors, said, “I wish that I could have come up with more, said more, done more.”

    Mr. Sirois was not pleased by the conclusion either, saying on Saturday that he had hoped for a unanimous verdict.

    “I really went into it thinking that more people would’ve come over to the not guilty camp,” he said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/ny...-mistrial.html

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    Judge Says Retrial in Etan Patz Case Will Start in September

    By NOAH REMNICK
    The New York Times

    The retrial of the man accused of killing Etan Patz, the 6-year-old boy who vanished in 1979, will begin after Labor Day, a judge ruled on Tuesday.

    The man, Pedro Hernandez, 55, of Maple Shade, N.J., was tried in May 2015, but jurors deliberated for 18 days without reaching a decision. The trial ended with hung jury, with only one juror steadfastly voting against conviction.

    Etan was walking alone for the first time from his family’s SoHo loft to a school bus stop when he disappeared. He was among the first children pictured on a milk carton, and his disappearance helped focus awareness on missing children. His case remained unsolved for decades, though reports periodically surfaced that the boy had been spotted in foreign countries or walking the streets of New York.

    Mr. Hernandez was a teenager working in the bodega next to the bus stop when Etan disappeared. He was not arrested until 2012, when relatives told the authorities that he had implicated himself in the killing of a child.

    In two detailed confessions videotaped after a day of interrogation, Mr. Hernandez told detectives and then prosecutors that he had lured the boy, strangled him, then stashed his body in the trash between buildings a block away.

    Etan’s body was never found, and Mr. Hernandez’s lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, argued that his client has low intelligence and had invented the account of the murder because of a personality disorder that makes it difficult for him to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

    Etan’s parents, Stan and Julie Patz, have said they are convinced that Mr. Hernandez is guilty.

    The retrial was originally scheduled to begin in March, but the Manhattan district attorney’s office sought a delay to add a new lead prosecutor and new psychological experts to its team. Mr. Fishbein then requested a postponement because he was undergoing medical treatment on his back. Mr. Hernandez, who has been held at Rikers Island since his arrest, agreed to the delay so that Mr. Fishbein could continue as his lawyer.

    The judge who set the new schedule for the trial, Maxwell Wiley of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, is to rule on a series of evidentiary issues in the case by July 11. Jury selection is now expected to begin Sept. 6 or 7.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/ny...av=bottom-well

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    Pedro Hernandez Found Guilty of Kidnapping and Killing Etan Patz in 1979

    By RICK ROJAS
    The New York Times

    Pedro Hernandez, a former stock clerk in a Manhattan bodega who confessed to luring the 6-year-old Etan Patz into the store’s basement and attacking him, was found guilty on Tuesday of murder and kidnapping, a long-awaited step toward solving the nearly 40-year mystery that bedeviled investigators and forever changed the way parents watched over their children.

    A jury in State Supreme Court found Mr. Hernandez guilty on the ninth day of deliberations and two lengthy trials that brought new attention to Etan’s disappearance on May 25, 1979, as he walked to his school bus stop alone for the first time.

    At the time, the case shook New York City, as photographs of Etan, with his sandy hair and smirk of a smile, were printed on “missing” posters plastered around the city and splashed on the front pages of newspapers, on television newscasts and even — for the first time — on milk cartons. The alarm caused by his disappearance reverberated around the country, embodying the worst fears of parents and helping to change the way the authorities tracked child abductions.

    But decades of looking into various suspects and fruitless searches failed to yield answers for Etan’s parents, Stanley and Julie Patz, who have remained in their loft on Prince Street as SoHo evolved into a place far different than the semi-industrial area it had been when Etan was a child. Investigators were led to Mr. Hernandez, who lived in a small New Jersey town outside Philadelphia, only after his brother-in-law called detectives in 2012 to share his suspicion that he could be responsible.

    The outcome was a victory for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who decided to prosecute Mr. Hernandez a second time; a previous trial ended in 2015 with the jury deadlocked after 18 days of deliberation. A lone juror declined to convict, saying he had been persuaded by the defense’s arguments about Mr. Hernandez’s mental health issues and the possibility of another suspect.

    Etan’s remains have never been found, and prosecutors did not have any scientific evidence from crime scenes to corroborate their arguments. But the prosecution team, led by two veteran assistant district attorneys, Joan Illuzzi and Joel J. Seidemann, zeroed in on Mr. Hernandez’s own words to build their case, pulling from the detailed confessions he had given to the authorities around the time of his arrest and to mental health experts during evaluations of him.

    In the various interviews recorded on video, which prosecutors repeatedly played for jurors during the four-month trial, Mr. Hernandez described encountering a boy on the sidewalk outside the bodega and asking him if he wanted a soda. He told investigators that he led him down the steps into the basement, and then, he started choking the boy as his own legs quivered. He said he put the boy into a plastic bag and the bag into a box, which he left with garbage nearby. But, he said, he believed the child was still alive.

    He also signed one of the “missing” posters, confirming for investigators that Etan was the boy he attacked.

    “I just couldn’t let go,” Mr. Hernandez said in one of the interviews. “I felt like something just took over me.”

    He did not offer a motive, claiming he had not sexually abused Etan or any other child. But in her closing arguments, Ms. Illuzzi argued otherwise, calling it the likely reason for the attack.

    Mr. Hernandez’s lawyers tried to undermine their own client’s credibility, saying that he was the only witness against himself and that he was an unreliable one.

    They described Mr. Hernandez as having a low I.Q. and a personality disorder that made it difficult for him to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The defense contended that Mr. Hernandez’s confessions reflected a fiction he had concocted. They also argued that he was susceptible to pressure from detectives during an hourslong interrogation where, at one point, he had curled on the floor into the fetal position and repeatedly asked to go home.

    Prosecutors sought to portray Mr. Hernandez as mercurial and controlling yet also deeply religious and desperate to unburden himself of the guilt he carried for attacking Etan. To support that argument, the prosecution called to testify different people to whom Mr. Hernandez had made admissions over the years, telling them, with some varying details, that he had killed a child in New York City.

    A member of a church group testified that Mr. Hernandez fell to his knees in tears, saying he had attacked a child. His former wife, with whom he has had an acrimonious relationship, recalled on the witness stand him pulling her aside before they married and telling her he had killed a “muchacho,” which she had inferred to be a teenage boy. Though she also testified that, after they had married, she found an image of Etan, taken from one of the missing posters, in a box of his in a closet.

    The first witness called to testify by prosecutors at the start of the trial in October was Etan’s mother, Julie Patz. She recounted a hectic morning and what turned out to be her final moments with her son. It was the Friday before Memorial Day weekend; she was busy tending to her other children, and Etan sprung out of bed.

    He had been pushing to be more independent, she said, and he pleaded with her to let him walk the nearly two blocks to the bus stop on his own. She reluctantly agreed and walked him outside. He set off wearing his Eastern Airlines cap and carrying a $1 bill given to him by a neighborhood handyman on a visit to his workshop. His plan was to stop in the bodega for a soda along the way. That afternoon, when Etan did not return home, Ms. Patz testified, she called around and learned that he had never made it to school or boarded his bus.

    At the time, Mr. Hernandez was an 18-year-old high school dropout who had recently come to the city from Camden, N.J. Prosecutors said that soon after Etan disappeared, possibly within days, Mr. Hernandez returned to New Jersey, later taking a job at a dress factory.

    His lawyers depicted Mr. Hernandez as struggling with a mental illness that loosened his grip on reality. They said that he had schizotypal personality disorder, a condition marked by symptoms that include severe social anxiety, paranoia and unusual beliefs. His youngest daughter, Becky, testified that he discussed the hallucinations he had of demons and an angelic woman in white. She also described how he would cover windows and cracks in the walls out of fear of being watched and would water a dead tree branch thinking they would grow.

    The defense suggested that another man, a convicted pedophile, could have been the culprit. The man, Jose Ramos, had a relationship with a woman who had been hired to walk Etan home from school, and was, for years, considered a suspect by investigators. The defense contended that Mr. Ramos, who is in prison, had the motive and the opportunity to have been responsible.

    Prosecutors have dismissed the theory of Mr. Ramos’s involvement, saying that it was not supported by the evidence. The prosecution also countered that Mr. Hernandez was feigning symptoms of his mental illness. They argued that he was savvy enough to negotiate a divorce from his former wife on his own and obtain disability benefits.

    Ms. Illuzzi described Mr. Hernandez as a predator, whose reserved demeanor in the courtroom bellied his cunning. In her closing arguments, she said that before he struck, Mr. Hernandez had been “keenly watching and admiring this friendly, beautiful child.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/n...e=sectionfront

  8. #8
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    Pedro Hernandez Gets 25 Years to Life in Murder of Etan Patz

    By JAMES C. McKINLEY, Jr.
    The New York Times

    Pedro Hernandez, a former store clerk who told the police that he murdered the 6-year-old Etan Patz as the boy headed to school in 1979, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison on Tuesday, bringing to a close a missing-child case that bedeviled investigators for decades and forever changed the way American parents protected their children.

    It took two trials, both of which lasted five months, for prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office to persuade a jury to convict Mr. Hernandez of kidnapping and murder. His first trial ended two years ago in a hung jury after one juror held out for acquittal.

    On Tuesday, Etan’s parents, Stan and Julie Patz, stood and spoke inside a Manhattan courtroom before Mr. Hernandez was formally sentenced. Mr. Patz turned toward Mr. Hernandez and said, “Pedro Hernandez, after all these years we finally know what dark secret you had locked in your heart. You took our precious child and threw him in the garbage. I will never forgive you. The God you pray to will never forgive you.”

    The case against Mr. Hernandez, 56, turned almost entirely on videotaped confessions he made to the police and a prosecutor, statements that his lawyers argued were fictions invented by a mentally ill man of diminished intellectual capacity who was under intense pressure from detectives. Etan’s body has never been found and no scientific evidence linked Mr. Hernandez to the crime.

    But in February the jury ultimately found Mr. Hernandez’s statements compelling and determined that his account meshed with the facts surrounding Etan’s disappearance.

    Etan vanished on May 25, 1979, while walking to a school bus stop near his parent’s loft in SoHo. It was the first time Etan’s parents had allowed him to go to the bus stop on his own. Etan, a first grader, was carrying a tote bag full of Matchbox cars and a dollar to buy a drink. He never made it to school.

    The case sent a wave of fear through the city and reverberated with parents across the country who had to rethink where or whether to let their children venture out alone. New Yorkers from that era still remember the search: the police helicopters hovering over Lower Manhattan, volunteers shouting Etan’s name in the street, the ubiquitous posters with an image of the sandy-haired boy.

    As the years dragged on without an arrest, the Patz family worked with parents of other missing children in the United States to raise awareness about child abductions. (Etan was one of the first missing children to be pictured on a milk carton.)

    Their efforts led to changes in the way law enforcement authorities track such cases. The date of his disappearance, May 25, was designated by President Ronald Reagan as National Missing Children’s Day, and his case helped prompt the creation, in 1984, of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

    Mr. Hernandez’s conviction was a major victory for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who reopened the long-dormant case in 2010 at the request of the Patz family, a decision that created a wave of publicity that eventually led to Mr. Hernandez’s arrest. Mr. Vance also chose to prosecute Mr. Hernandez a second time after the mistrial.

    “Etan was never forgotten,” Mr. Vance said on Tuesday in an interview before Mr. Hernandez’s sentencing. “We refused to let him disappear into history because we were committed to taking another hard look at this case, and that hard look paid off.”

    For nearly two decades, the prime suspect had been Jose Ramos, a convicted pedophile who in 1979 dated a woman who worked for the Patz family.

    In 1988, Mr. Ramos told a federal prosecutor that on the day Etan disappeared, he had encountered a little boy he thought was Etan in Washington Square Park. He said he had taken the boy to his apartment, molested him and then left him at a subway station.

    But Mr. Ramos never confessed to murdering Etan and later retracted his statement. Prosecutors in Manhattan re-examined the evidence against Mr. Ramos, but found it was too flimsy to bring charges, even though the Patz family won a wrongful-death suit they filed against him.

    Mr. Hernandez, a disabled factory worker living in a small New Jersey town near Philadelphia, did not become a suspect until May 2012, when his brother-in-law called the police to share his suspicion that he could be responsible. The brother-in-law had seen news reports that the police were digging up a basement in SoHo as part of the renewed investigation, searching for Etan’s body.

    In 1979, Mr. Hernandez was a high-school dropout working as a clerk in the bodega at West Broadway and Prince Street, near Etan’s bus stop.

    After a long day of interrogation in May 2012, he told detectives in a videotaped interview that he had met Etan outside the bodega and lured him into the basement with the promise of soda. There, he said, he choked the boy. He later repeated the story to a prosecutor during a longer interview, which was also recorded.

    “I just couldn’t let go,” Mr. Hernandez said in one interview. “I felt like something just took over me.”

    Mr. Hernandez said he put Etan inside a plastic bag and then inside a box and left him a block away in an alleyway with some trash. He claimed the child was still alive when he abandoned him. He also denied that he had sexually abused Etan.

    Mr. Hernandez’s lawyers, Harvey Fishbein and Alice L. Fontier, presented evidence that he had a low IQ as well as schizotypal personality disorder, which caused him to mingle fact and fiction. His daughter testified that he sometimes hallucinated about demons and an angelic woman dressed in white.

    Mr. Fishbein told the jury that Mr. Hernandez’s weak personality cracked under questioning from the detectives: He convinced himself he was guilty.

    The prosecution team, Joan Illuzzi, Joel J. Seidemann and James Vinocur, introduced witnesses who said that Mr. Hernandez had made a similar confession to people at a prayer retreat shortly after Etan disappeared. In addition, his former wife and a childhood friend testified that Mr. Hernandez had told them in the early 1980s that he had killed a boy in New York City, though he gave different details.

    In the end, the jurors accepted Mr. Hernandez’s words as credible. One juror said Mr. Hernandez might have a personality disorder, but none of the experts who testified had convinced the juror that the disorder could make a person confess to something he had invented.

    “We think he could tell right from wrong,” the juror, Michael Castellon, said. “He could tell fantasy from reality.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/n...T.nav=top-news

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