The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a federal appeals court overstepped its authority when it overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez in the case of Etan Patz, a decision that effectively reinstates the verdict against him. In its opinion, the court wrote that the Second Circuit exceeded its authority in holding that Hernandez is entitled to relief, referring to the New York based appeals court that had thrown out the conviction.
The justices grounded their ruling in a 1996 federal law that was intended to reduce federal court oversight of state criminal trials. Under that framework, the high court found that the appeals court had gone too far in granting Hernandez a path to a new trial, leaving the state conviction standing rather than reopening the case in the federal system.
Hernandez, who is 64 years old, has been serving a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. The case centers on the disappearance of Etan, who vanished on May 25, 1979, while walking to his downtown Manhattan school bus. The boy's case became one of the most closely followed missing children cases in the country and shaped how such cases are handled.
Etan was among the first missing children ever to appear on a milk carton, and the anniversary of his disappearance later became National Missing Children's Day. Hernandez, a resident of Maple Shade, New Jersey, worked at a nearby convenience shop at the time the boy disappeared, but he did not become a suspect in the case until many years later, in 2012.
Hernandez admitted to the crime while in police custody. According to the account read in court, that admission came after police questioned him for about seven hours before reading him his rights and recording the interview. Investigators say Hernandez then repeated his confession on tape at least two different times, while his lawyers have argued that he confessed falsely because of a mental illness.
The legal road to the conviction was long and uneven. Hernandez was tried twice. A jury deadlocked in 2015, and then a different panel of jurors convicted him at a 2017 retrial, closing a case that had remained unresolved for decades after Etan first disappeared from the streets of Lower Manhattan.
The dispute that reached the Supreme Court stemmed from a question the 2017 jurors raised during deliberations. They asked whether, if they decided Hernandez did not confess voluntarily before he had been read his rights, they would have to disregard his other confessions. The judge responded simply that the answer was no, and the jury went on to convict. The appeals court later overturned that verdict, a decision the Supreme Court has now reversed.