The defense attorney for a New Jersey man accused of kidnapping and killing six-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 asked a New York judge to respect the jury’s decisions after jurors have twice reported they are deadlocked.
The jury has deliberated since 15 April. On Tuesday, jurors told the judge that “after serious, significant and thorough deliberations we are unable to reach a unanimous decision”, according to news reporters in the courtroom.
#EtanPatz jury note reads " after serious, significant and thorough deliberations we are unable to reach a unanimous decision." #1010WINS
— Juliet Papa (@winsjuliet) May 5, 2015
“This is a tired jury,” defense attorney Harvey Fishbein told NY1. Fishbein represents Pedro Hernandez, who in 2012 confessed to killing Patz when he worked as a clerk in the boy’s neighborhood in Soho, New York. “They have said that they are finished, and we ask the court to respect that and not to send them back – that’s why he did this over our objection.”
Fishbein has characterized the statements to investigators as the ravings of a mentally ill man. Patz’s body, clothing and belongings were never found.
This is the second time that jurors told the judge in the case that they are deadlocked.
They also hit an impasse on 29 April but continued deliberations. The defense asked for a mistrial on Tuesday, while prosecutors urged the judge to have the jury continue deliberations.
The jurors reheard closing arguments last Thursday, a day after the judge ordered them to continue. On Monday, the judge agreed to provide the jury with a printer after earlier rejecting it. Jurors had made their own spreadsheet to organize their deliberations and wanted to make paper copies of it.
Jurors had hours of testimony read back to them and reviewed dozens of exhibits before asking to rehear the summations. Such requests are rare; New York judges have discretion on whether to grant them, according to rulings in earlier cases.
Closing arguments are not considered evidence – rather, they are each side’s way of framing it. It was not clear what jurors in Hernandez’s case hoped to glean.
“I think it helps clarify whatever issues might remain in some jurors’ minds,” said Fishbein, adding that he was encouraged by the possibility that the summations could aid deliberations.
Hernandez made a stunning confession in 2012 that he had killed Patz, who disappeared on his way to school in 1979 in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood where Hernandez, a teenager at the time, worked as a clerk in a corner store. But the boy’s body was never found, nor any trace of his clothing or belongings.
Hernandez was barely mentioned in police reports of the investigations of the day. But witnesses came forward at his trial earlier this year to say that periodically in the years after Patz’s disappearance, Hernandez mentioned strangling a child who came into the store.
In a statement to police following a tip-off from a relative in 2012, Hernandez, now 54, said he lured the boy to the shop basement and killed him.
“I grabbed him by the neck and started choking him,” the court heard that Hernandez had told investigators.
Witnesses said he had also admitted molesting Patz, which Hernandez later denied to investigators.
Defense lawyers told the jury hearing the case in state supreme court in Manhattan that the defendant, from Maple Shade, New Jersey, was innocent and his confessions were nothing more than the ravings of a mentally ill man with a low IQ.
Moreover, his lawyers pointed the finger instead at a convicted pedophile, Jose Ramos, telling the court he had confessed while in prison in Pennsylvania to killing Patz.
After Patz’s disappearance, the boy’s image was one of the first to be displayed on milk cartons in a public campaign to find him, and his case heightened national awareness of missing children.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
