Quantcast

The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Defense Rests in Etan Patz Murder Case, Asks Jury to Discount Confession

 The owner of restaurants Olea and Allswell testified in the Etan Patz murder trial Monday.
Etan Patz Trial
View Full Caption

MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — Pedro Hernandez, the man accused of murdering 6-year-old Etan Patz more than 35 years ago, should not be found guilty, his lawyer argued during an impassioned summation Monday, because his confession was the product of a mentally ill, delusional mind.

“Hernandez is the only witness against himself,” Fishbein said. “The stories he told against him…are the only evidence. Yet he is inconsistent and unreliable.”

Hernandez, 53, charged with killing the young SoHo boy in 1979, sat silently in a striped, buttoned-down shirt and tie, as his lead attorney Harvey Fishbein spoke for more than three hours, trying one last time to convince a jury that his client was mentally ill, delusional, and had made false confessions about the little boy’s death.

After a 10-week trial, the defense’s case came to a close, in Manhattan Supreme Court Monday afternoon.

Fishbein argued that Patz’s confession was “filled with improbabilities and impossibilities.“ He implored the jury to consider that there was never any physical evidence unearthed since the boy went missing on May 25, 1979, the first day he was allowed to walk to the school bus on his own, and that the prosecution had failed to produce any evidence that corroborated Patz’s confession.

“That evidence never came because it doesn’t exist,” he told the jury.

The reality of who Hernandez is does not mesh with the picture that the prosecution has been trying to paint of him as a cunning child killer, Fishbein said. His client, instead, had a low IQ, was easily confused and suffered from a long history of mental health problems.

“They  [prosecutors] tried to demonize him,” Fishbein roared in court. “But it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit at all.”

Fishbein continually tried to hammer away at the notion that the confessions Hernandez had given, both to family and friends over the years, and to police, were  “just stories” and not confessions.

He argued that the several hours of taped confessions to police were coerced, and were done after hour of untaped interrogations.

In the videos, which jurors watched earlier in the trial, Hernandez, in a quiet, high-pitched voice, states matter-of-factly that he saw the boy standing on the street, asked him if he wanted a soda, then took the boy into the basement of the West Broadway bodega where he worked and immediately began strangling him with his hands.

He said that even though the little boy went limp after a few moments of choking, he was still breathing and moving when he was put into a large garbage bag. Hernandez then placed the bag into a box and dumped it into an open basement along an alley a couple of blocks away.

Fishbein also pushed the idea that Jose Ramos, a convicted child molester who knew a woman that had babysat Patz, was the actual killer.

"[Patz's death] was not because of Pedro Hernandez, it was because of Jose Ramos," he said. "[Hernandez} can’t tell you why he did it because he doesn’t know why, he doesn’t have a reason."

Etan, whose family still lives on Prince Street, disappeared the first day he was allowed to walk to the school bus by himself. A lengthy police investigation proved inconclusive.

In May 2012, Hernandez, a husband and father of two from New Jersey with no criminal record, was arrested for the murder of Patz after a relative contacted police. He's been in jail ever since.

In 2001, the child was declared dead, even though his body was never found.

The prosecution is set to begin their closing arguments Tuesday morning.