Supreme Court restores Etan Patz murder conviction in 6-3 ruling
What's next: Pedro Hernandez avoids a third trial and remains under a 25-years-to-life sentence in New York.
The Supreme Court reinstated Pedro Hernandez’s 2017 murder and kidnapping conviction in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz, reversing a federal appeals court that had ordered a new trial. In a 6-3 unsigned ruling, the justices found the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went too far when it threw out the verdict over the trial judge’s response to a jury question about Hernandez’s confessions. Patz vanished on May 25, 1979, while walking to a school bus stop in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, and his body was never found. Hernandez, now 64, was arrested in 2012 after a tip about an earlier confession at a church group. His first trial ended with a deadlocked jury before a second jury convicted him in 2017.