The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday reinstated the murder conviction for 64-year-old Pedro Hernandez, who was found guilty in the 1979 killing of six-year-old Etan Patz in New York City.
Hernandez is currently serving 25 years to life behind bars after being convicted in 2017, Fox 5 reported.
The article said, “In a 6-3 decision, the justices granted an appeal from Manhattan prosecutors, undoing a lower federal court’s ruling that had previously overturned the verdict against Pedro Hernandez. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.”
Patz disappeared on May 25, 1979, as he walked alone for the first time to his school bus stop, and his disappearance shook the city.
The case also “fundamentally changed how America responds to missing children, and made Etan one of the first children to have his face printed on a milk carton. Today, the anniversary of his disappearance is recognized as National Missing Children’s Day,” the Fox article stated.
Hernandez worked at a convenience store near where the boy went missing but did not become a suspect until 2012 when he confessed to the crime, however, his attorneys claimed they were false confessions due to his mental illness.
“They emphasized that the admission came after police queried him for about seven hours before reading him his rights and recording the interview. Hernandez then repeated his confession on tape, at least twice,” the Associated Press reported:
During deliberations, the 2017 jurors asked a complicated question: If they decided Hernandez didn’t confess voluntarily when he hadn’t been read his rights yet, must they disregard his other confessions? The then-judge responded simply, “the answer is no.” The jury went on to convict.
In overturning that verdict, the appeals court said the jury’s question should have gotten a more fulsome answer, including the possibility of discounting all the confessions.
Video footage from 48 Hours showed the outside of the convenience store near the bus stop where Hernandez had worked before Patz disappeared. When police interviewed Hernandez, he told investigators he had offered Patz a soda and asked him to go into the basement with him to get it.
“And then I choked him,” Hernandez said.
He then took police to where the basement had been located and told them he put the child inside a box, walked down the street with the box on his shoulder, and took it down a flight of stairs. He claimed he left it where police said they believe garbage collectors later retrieved it:
Patz’s body was never found, according to ABC 7.
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