Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who as Manhattan district attorney oversaw two trials in the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz, said Tuesday that a federal court’s reversal of the murder and kidnapping conviction in the case “came out of left field for me.”
The verdict in Etan’s 1979 killing, which came after more than 30 years of investigation and prosecution, appeared to end a notorious case that transfixed New York City and the nation.
But on Monday, a three-judge panel overturned the conviction, ordering that the defendant, Pedro Hernandez, be given a new trial within a “reasonable period,” or be released from his 25-year-to-life prison sentence.
Mr. Vance’s case had depended heavily on several confessions by Mr. Hernandez, who has a history of mental illness. The first came before Mr. Hernandez was informed of his constitutional right to remain silent; another, which was videotaped, came shortly after. The trial judge, the appeals court found, did not appropriately instruct the jury in response to its question about the confessions.
Mr. Vance said he respected the decision by the federal judges who serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, but he was “surprised and saddened for the Patz family.”
“I still believe the decision to bring the case was absolutely the right decision,” he said, adding, “as the D.A. I was certainly convinced myself that Pedro Hernandez killed Etan Patz, and I think that today.”
Edward B. Diskant, a lawyer who handled Mr. Hernandez’s federal appeal, said that the case was riddled with problems from the beginning. There were questions about his client’s ability to truly comprehend his right to counsel, whether the confessions were truly voluntary and the inconsistencies in them, he said. It’s “not surprising to me at all that two juries struggled with what to make of that,” he said.
“All of those, I would have thought, would have given an experienced prosecutors real hesitation about whether this was a voluntarily obtained and reliable confession,” Mr. Diskant said.
The panel’s ruling on Monday came just over a year after another of Mr. Vance’s high-profile cases, against the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, was overturned on appeal in a staggering decision. New York’s top court found that a trial judge should not have allowed prosecutors to call witnesses who accused Mr. Weinstein of sexual abuse in incidents that were not part of the charges.
Mr. Weinstein was convicted this year by Mr. Vance’s successor, Alvin L. Bragg, on one sexual assault charge, which Mr. Vance said Tuesday “simply affirms and confirms the appropriateness of bringing the case in the first instance.”
“There’s a tendency to focus on high-profile cases as a barometer of how the office does,” Mr. Vance said, “when it’s an office where you’re handling over a million cases over the course of a career.”
The trial against Mr. Hernandez had its challenges from the start.
Almost immediately after Etan disappeared, New York police officers began canvassing the streets of SoHo. They followed thousands of leads on where the young boy could have vanished to as he walked about two blocks to his school bus stop on a May morning. None paid off.
Mr. Vance said he reopened the investigation decades later thinking that the passage of time and advances in DNA could reveal important evidence that had been overlooked. So 33 years after Etan disappeared, investigators were back on the search, spending days excavating basements with jackhammers in an effort to uncover his body.
In the end, the police never found Etan’s body. However, their efforts reawakened the Hernandez family’s suspicions.
As the police tore up the basement of a building on Prince Street in 2012, just doors from the Patz family home, one of Mr. Hernandez’s relatives noticed the activity. He reported to the police that Mr. Hernandez, who lived in southern New Jersey, had for years said he had “done a bad thing and killed a child in New York,” officials said at the time.
The case moved quickly. Investigators traveled to Camden County, N.J., and questioned Mr. Hernandez over seven hours, during which he broke down in tears and confessed to killing Etan, the police said.
His lawyer at the time, Harvey Fishbein, argued that the confession was false and the product of psychotic hallucinations. However, the trial judge, Maxwell Wiley of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, ruled that the confession could be admitted as evidence at trial.
Without scientific evidence, prosecutors relied heavily on Mr. Hernandez’s confessions — to law enforcement, as well as others, including a church group.
Mr. Hernandez’s first trial in 2015 ended after 18 days of deliberation with a hung jury. The lone juror who refused to convict said he had believed that Mr. Hernandez’s initial confession seemed “coerced.”
At a second trial two years later, the jury also focused on the confession, sending three notes to Justice Wiley as they deliberated. In the third note, jurors asked whether, if they found that Mr. Hernandez’s confession before he was read his rights was not voluntary, they should then disregard his later recorded confession.
It was at this point that the federal judges said Justice Wiley blundered.
“The trial court instructed the jury, without further explanation, that ‘the answer is, no,’” they wrote in their ruling on Monday.But his instructions were inconsistent with a Supreme Court ruling that it is unconstitutional for law enforcement officials to extract confessions without so-called Miranda warnings, then ask defendants to repeat them after being made aware of their rights.
Still, the jury continued deliberations and convicted Mr. Hernandez seven days later.
On Tuesday, Mr. Vance defended his office’s case, saying “everything that went into evidence was evidence that had been obviously approved by the trial court to be in evidence.”
“The Court of Appeals made its decision, and that’s their decision that stands for now,” he said. “We’ll see what Mr. Bragg decides to do. He has decisions about whether or not he wishes to retry the case.”
On Monday, a spokeswoman, Emily Tuttle, said the Manhattan district attorney’s office is “reviewing the decision.”
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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