MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT – After 18 days of painstakingly deliberating the fate of a former store clerk accused of murdering 6-year-old Etan Patz 36 years ago, jurors could not come to a resolution in the case, but there was no rancor among the group of 12, they said.
In the end, after jurors told a judge for a third time that they were deadlocked Friday, there was only one man who said he would not convict Pedro Hernandez.
Despite being the lone holdout for acquittal in the case, juror Adam Sirois told reporters after Judge Maxwell Wiley declared a mistrial, that the process “wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t torturous.”
Sirois — who said several factors including issues about Hernandez’s mental health, as well as his “bizarre” confession kept him from a guilty verdict — maintained that deliberations were thorough and “very, very intellectual.”
“I felt all of my fellow jurors were very respectful of my position,” he said, surrounded by eight other jurors at a press conference. “I’m proud to be on the jury with all of them, even if I don’t agree with all of them about the decision.
“I’m really honored that this is our system,” he added. “It was really beautiful to see it from the inside.”
Other jurors — who were ultimately convinced Hernandez, 54, a father of three with no criminal record, had strangled Etan in the basement of a Prince Street bodega on May 25, 1979 — echoed Sirios’ sentiment that the deliberations were trying, but not contentious.
“There were times it got frustrating,” said juror Jennifer O’Connor. “There were times people read the same sentence, and looked at it through a different lens…but there was no screaming or hitting.”
Initially, jurors said they were split among people who were “unsure” and those who wanted to convict.
Jurors that spoke to reporters said they felt they had worked as hard as they could to come to a resolution in the case.
The jurors said they meticulously created Excel spreadsheets to keep track of evidence in the case. They reheard numerous pieces of testimony, rewatched hours of Hernandez’s confession tapes and pored over the information each side presented through the emotional 10-week trial.
Twice in the deliberations jurors told the judge they were deadlocked, but the judge told them to keep pushing on. At those points, the jury was split 10 to 2 in favor of finding Hernandez guilty.
The other holdout, juror Doug Hitchner, told jurors he finally changed his mind to guilty on Friday, after deciding once and for all that the argument for acquittal “didn’t hold water.”
He, like other jurors, pointed to Hernandez’s confessions — to police and several friends and relatives over the years — as pivotal in making his final decision. “The quality and quantity” of the confessions ultimately swayed him, Hitchner said.
Hernandez confessed to police for several hours — a confession the defense argued was coerced. He also, through the years, had confessed to several relatives, friends and fellow church members.
Those who decided Hernandez was guilty pointed to several reasons for their decision.
O’Connor said details in Hernandez's confessions, about how he strangled the boy, and where he placed the body, seemed like things only the murderer would know.
And while the defense argued that Hernandez suffered from delusions and couldn’t tell fact from fiction, O’Connor said she concurred with the prosecution’s version of Hernandez’s mental distress.
His medical history “seemed to be a profile of someone who did something heinous and was trying to repress it, bury it deep down,” she said.
“I’m very sad that we could not bring resolution to the case for a lot of reasons, for the Patz family, for the Hernandez family, for the city of New York,” O’Connor added. “But we really tried our hardest — I don’t think we could have done anymore.”
Another juror, Tyrell Martori, urged the Manhattan DA’s office to “please pursue the matter again.”
And one juror, the foreman, Aliaa Dahhan, had a final message for the defendant, who’s been in jail since 2012.
“Pedro Hernandez, you know what you did,” she said, as jurors left the press conference.
Etan's father, who hadn't spoken to the press about Hernandez previously, said he was also convinced of Hernandez's guilt Friday.
Stan Patz told reporters following the mistrial that he vehemently supported a retrial.
"Pedro Hernandez's story is simple, it makes sense, the timing's right, everything worked," he said. "This man did it, he said it. How many times does a man have to confess before someone believes him?"
Stan Patz's wife and daughter did not come to court, though he said that the family had already managed to find closure.
"Etan was a beautiful, outgoing, friendly, curious little kid. He would have made a great adult," Patz said. "But that's what got him killed."
