The Supreme Court on Monday morning threw out a lower-court ruling that called for a new trial for the man convicted of the 1979 kidnapping and murder of Etan Patz, one of the first missing children to be featured on milk cartons.
The announcement came as part of a list of orders released from the justices’ June 18 conference. The justices will meet for another conference – the final regularly scheduled conference before their summer recess – on Thursday, June 25. The court is likely to release orders from that conference on Monday, June 29, at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
In 1979, 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared while on his way to the school bus stop in New York City. He was never found. Patz’s case was among those that led to the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Pedro Hernandez was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Patz in 2017. The trial relied on Hernandez’s confession, which he had first made after approximately seven hours of police questioning – during which he was not advised of his right under the Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona to remain silent and have an attorney present. Police officers then provided Hernandez with a Miranda warning, after which he confessed again on video – the confessions that prosecutors used at Hernandez’s trial.
While the jury was deliberating, it asked the judge whether it should “disregard” Hernandez’s confessions after he received his Miranda warning if it concluded that his confessions before those warnings were not “voluntary.”
After the judge responded “the answer is no,” the jury deliberated for another week. It eventually convicted Hernandez of felony murder and kidnapping; he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
After Hernandez’s initial appeals were unsuccessful, he sought post-conviction relief in federal court. He pointed to a 2004 case, Missouri v. Seibert, in which the Supreme Court held that a confession repeated after a suspect was interrogated without a Miranda warning, confessed, and then given a Miranda warning should be suppressed.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit “agree[d] with the district court that the state trial court’s instruction was clearly wrong under Seibert.” Moreover, the court of appeals concluded, that “error was manifestly prejudicial” to Hernandez. The court sent the case back to the district court for it to order Hernandez’s release or a new trial.
The state came to the Supreme Court in December, asking the justices to weigh in. The Supreme Court, it argued in McCarthy v. Hernandez, “has never held that Seibert’s ruling on pretrial suppression extends to jury deliberations.” “Nor,” it contended, “was there any basis to believe … that the jury was even asking about ‘the infrequent case’ covered by Seibert, because their note referred only to a potential Miranda violation, and not to the ‘deliberate’ strategy to evade Miranda that is the indispensable prerequisite for suppression.” Moreover, the state added, requiring a new trial nearly a half-century after Patz’s disappearance will impose “severe costs” and pose “daunting difficulties.”
Hernandez countered that the 2nd Circuit’s ruling “was based on the straightforward application of this Court’s precedent to the ‘extraordinary circumstances of this case.’” He emphasized that, “aside from those purported confessions, there is no evidence linking Hernandez to the disappearance of Patz or even confirming that Patz is deceased.”
In a 10-page, unsigned opinion on Monday, the court revived Hernandez’s conviction and sentence. It began by emphasizing that federal courts can only grant post-conviction relief if the state court’s decision was “contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law.” But in this case, the court said, it was not clearly established under federal law that the trial court needed to instruct the jury in Hernandez’s case about whether it could disregard his confession. And the rule established in Seibert, the court continued, did not apply to “a jury’s consideration of a confession that a court has admitted.”
Moreover, the court added, “[t]he panel’s opinion appears to reflect serious doubt about the reliability of Hernandez’s confessions, but” the federal law governing post-conviction relief for state prisoners “does not allow a federal habeas court to disturb a state-court conviction based on such an evaluation of the evidence.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated, without explanation, that they would have denied the state’s petition.
