BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Cy Vance, Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said on Monday that he will retry Pedro Hernandez for the kidnapping and murder of Etan Patz, 6, following a recent mistrial that resulted in a hung jury.
Hernandez’s trial ended on May 8 with the jurors deadlocked after 18 days of deliberation. At the end, there was one holdout versus the other 11 jurors who were ready to convict.
Hernandez, 54, a former Soho bodega worker, was arrested in 2012 in New Jersey, where, after a six-hour interrogation, he confessed to cops that he killed Patz, who was walking to the P.S. 3 school-bus stop by himself for the first time. But his defense team argued that his confession was coerced and that he has a low I.Q. and various mental problems.
Speaking on MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” Vance told the show’s host, Abby Huntsman, “The Etan Patz case, certainly. I intend to retry the case. And I think the evidence put in by our prosecutors was compelling, and it was clear. And, it is a challenging case — I’ve never said otherwise — but it’s a case that we believe should be prosecuted, that’s why we did [it]. In our system, it happens from time to time that jurors cannot be unanimous, and this was one of those cases.”
Vance said that prosecutors will announce at a court date on June 10 that they will retry Hernandez.
