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Patz Jurors Face Unusual Burden of Mulling Fate of Confessed 'Killer'

By Murray Weiss | April 28, 2015 7:31am
 Etan Patz, 6, disappeared May 25, 1979.
Etan Patz, 6, disappeared May 25, 1979.
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Stanley K. Patz

MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — As the Etan Patz trial enters its 11th week, jurors are facing an unusual burden: determining whether to convict Pedro Hernandez on the basis of his confessions without any physical evidence to back his tale — or free the only suspect to ever confess to the sensational 1979 murder.

In most murder trials, defendants claim they are innocent, and the burden of proof falls on the prosecution to prove them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But in the Patz case, jurors face a defendant who has admitted several times he is Patz's killer.

Justice Maxwell Wiley has instructed the jury that it cannot convict Hernandez solely on the accused man's own words, especially since Etan's body has never been found.

That leaves jurors with the gut-wrenching responsibility of deciding between justice and potential closure for the Patz family by convicting Hernandez, now 54, against the possibility that they are convicting a mentally feeble man who was pressured into a false confession, as his lawyer argues.

Hernandez’s defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein has insisted jurors disregard his client's numerous confessions, arguing that Hernandez only imagined that he killed Patz. Fishbein has argued that the killer was more likely Jose Ramos, a convicted pedophile who dated Etan's babysitter and has admitted to trying to molest the boy the day he went missing.

Jurors spent Friday and Monday listening to hours of read-backs from federal investigators who got Ramos to admit he had grabbed a boy on May 25, 1979. One ex-fed was Stuart Grabois, an assistant Manhattan U.S. Attorney. The other is Mary Galligan, an FBI supervisory agent who went on to become the "case agent" on the 9/11 attacks. Grabois told jurors Ramos claimed when the boy who he said might have been Etan rebuffed his advances, he put him on a bus headed uptown. 

"There is no question there is something wrong with Hernandez, but there has to be a question about the voluntariness of his confessions," said Murray Richman, a noted criminal defense attorney, who predicts the trial could be headed for a hung jury.

Yet, if jurors agree with Fishbein, they would have decided to let a "confessed" killer go free, never to be charged again, experts say. And that, experts say, could be an even larger burden for the panel than convicting him.

Prosecutors hope the jurors will finally rule out Ramos and focus solely on Hernandez, who they insist is fully competent and in control of his mind, citing his long work history and his time as a father to two grown children he raised with his second wife.

Prosecutors have argued that Ramos, now 71, who was found responsible for the boy's death by a civil court judge in 2004, was just an empty lead pursued by honest, but overzealous, lawmen.

A veteran homicide prosecutor, who asked for anonymity, agreed with Richman, but added he felt for the jury. "This involves a very young boy and I think they are giving it a real shot."

On the day Patz disappeared, he was walking alone for the first time to a Soho school bus stop. Hernandez, then 17, was a clerk working in his uncle’s Soho bodega, which Etan passed on the way to the bus.

Despite a massive search and intense manhunt, the NYPD never quizzed Hernandez, who quickly moved in with relatives in New Jersey within a few days of Patz’s disappearance.

During the past three and a half decades, he confessed several times aboutkilling a boy in New York City, confiding in loved ones or trusted friends and acquaintances, who kept the revelations to themselves. One of them tipped police a few years ago when there were new media reports about the Patz case.

When Hernandez was finally questioned, he provided detailed videotaped confessions and took detectives through the murder and crime scene, detailing how he lured Etan into the bodega with the promise of soda, strangled him and then deposited his body in a garbage bag a block away on a pile of trash.

On one tape, Hernandez described the now-altered crime scene — including a wall where he left Etan, and no stairs leading to an alleyway that is there today. Detectives examined building permits and old photos that showed Hernandez was accurate.

Deliberations are set to enter the 10th day on Tuesday.