“We conclude that the state trial court contradicted clearly established federal law and that this error was not harmless,” the Second Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in its decision.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said it was reviewing the decision.<\/p>\n
The case haunted investigators for decades after the boy disappeared from the SoHo neighbourhood of Manhattan, and he has never been found.<\/p>\n
An aggressive missing person’s campaign featured the boy’s face on milk cartons and posters across the US. A sweeping investigation drew in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and raised new awareness about missing children.<\/p>\n
In 2012, authorities interrogated Hernandez, who told them he lured Patz down to a basement with an offer of a drink or a soda before strangling the young boy.<\/p>\n
Yet the appeals court wrote in its decision that Hernandez “has a documented history of mental illnesses and a low intelligence quotient (IQ)” and “initially confessed after approximately seven hours of unwarned questioning by three police officers.”<\/p>\n
After he confessed to the killing police read Hernandez his Miranda rights – a constitutionally mandated warning about self-incrimination – and recorded a video confession. He did so again for a federal prosecutor.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors relied heavily on the video confessions during Hernandez’s second trial. <\/p>\n
The appeals court’s decision to order a new trial hinges on instructions that the 2017 jury received about those confessions as they deliberated Hernandez’s fate.<\/p>\n
In one note, jurors asked the judge to explain whether they should disregard his subsequent confessions if they found the first one “was not voluntary.”<\/p>\n
The state judge had replied: “The answer is, no.”<\/p>\n
The jury ultimately convicted Hernandez of felony murder and kidnapping, but acquitted him on the charge of intentional murder.<\/p>\n
In his appeal, Hernandez argued that this instruction was inconsistent with legal precedent and had unfairly prejudiced the jury. <\/p>\n
Lower courts denied his bid, but the federal appeals court ultimately sided with him in Monday’s decision.<\/p>\n
Hernandez’s attorney Harvey Fishbein released a statement saying: “We are grateful the Court has now given Pedro a chance to get his life back, and I call upon the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to drop these misguided charges and focus their efforts where they belong: on finding those actually responsible for the disappearance of Etan Patz.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“We conclude that the state trial court contradicted clearly established federal law and that this error was not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-281040","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114893590561997572","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}