By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) -New York prosecutors said on Tuesday they stood ready to retry a former Manhattan delicatessen worker whose conviction on kidnapping and murder charges in the 1979 slaying of 6-year-old Etan Patz was overturned four months ago by a federal appeals court.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has determined that “available, admissible evidence supports” the renewal of its prosecution of Pedro Hernandez on the same charges as before, the office said in a notice on Tuesday, in a case that once stoked national fears about missing and abducted children.
The decision by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, conveyed in a letter to a New York state court judge, essentially returns the case to the pretrial status that existed after Hernandez was indicted and reopens it to a new round of pleadings and court proceedings.
Hernandez, now in his mid-60s, was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and murdering Patz, who had vanished nearly 40 years earlier as he walked alone for the first time to a school bus stop two blocks from his home in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood on May 25, 1979. Hernandez, who worked in a bodega near the bus stop and was 18 when Patz vanished, was sentenced to a prison term of 25 years to life. He remains in custody.
The boy, who was never found, became one of the first missing children whose faces would become ubiquitous as emblems printed on the sides of milk cartons to publicize their disappearance in hopes of stirring investigative tips.
The Patz case captured U.S. media attention and endured as one of the country’s most infamous child disappearances until police arrested Hernandez in May 2012.
A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Hernandez conviction in July of this year, ruling that the trial judge had incorrectly instructed the jury and thus swayed the verdict against the defendant. A different judge later gave the DA’s office until December 1 to decide whether to seek a new trial, which must begin by June 1, 2026, to keep Hernandez in custody.
In Tuesday’s letter, the DA’s office said it was “prepared to proceed.”
Because of a lack of physical evidence or contemporary witnesses in the case, the 2016-2017 trial – Hernandez’s second after the first ended in a hung jury in 2015 – hinged almost entirely on his purported confessions.
His appeal centered on the judge’s instruction to jurors in response to their question as to how they should treat statements of self-incrimination that Hernandez gave during hours of interrogation by investigators without a lawyer present.
Prior to giving notice that prosecutors were ready to proceed with what would be a third trial in the case, the DA’s office had said that it intends to pursue a parallel strategy of petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the 2nd Circuit’s decision overturning the Hernandez conviction.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler)
