Supreme Court reinstates Pedro Hernandez's murder conviction in 1979 killing of Etan Patz

Etan Patz disappeared on May 25, 1979, the first morning his parents allowed him to walk alone to his school bus stop in SoHo, about a block from their home. He was among the first missing children to appear on milk cartons, and the anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children's Day. His body was never found.

Hernandez, who worked at a convenience shop near the bus stop at the time, did not become a suspect until 2012, when police learned he had told his ex-wife and others that he had strangled a boy years earlier. He repeated those admissions to law enforcement, but his lawyers said the confessions were false, the product of a mental illness that sometimes caused him to hallucinate. They noted that police questioned him for roughly seven hours before reading him his Miranda rights and recording the interview, after which he repeated the confession on tape at least twice. His first trial, in 2015, ended in a mistrial; a second jury convicted him in 2017.

The conviction was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which found that the trial judge had improperly answered a jury question during deliberations. Jurors had asked whether they must disregard Hernandez's subsequent, recorded confessions if they found his initial, pre-Miranda confession was not voluntary. The judge answered simply, "the answer is no." The Second Circuit said that response was "clearly wrong" and "manifestly prejudicial," finding the jury should have been told it could discount all confessions.