(NEW YORK) -- Pedro Hernandez, the man convicted of kidnapping and murdering Etan Patz in 1979, should be retried or released, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based its decision on a flawed jury instruction given by a New York state judge about Hernandez's purported confessions.
Hernandez, 64, is currently in state prison serving a sentence of 25 years to life after he was convicted in 2017 of kidnapping and murdering Patz, the 6-year-old boy whose face was the first placed on a milk carton to seek public help finding missing children.
A spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said, "We are reviewing the decision."
Because of the lack of physical evidence, the trial -- Hernandez's second, after the first jury hung -- hinged entirely on Hernandez's purported confessions to luring Etan into a basement as he walked to his school bus stop alone in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood.
Hernandez, who has a documented history of mental illnesses and a low IQ, initially confessed after seven hours of questioning by three police officers. Immediately after Hernandez confessed, the police administered Miranda warnings, began a video recording and had Hernandez repeat his confession on tape. He did so again, several hours later, to an assistant district attorney.
When deliberating, the jury sent the judge three different notes about Hernandez's confessions. One of them asked the judge to explain whether, if the jury found that Hernandez's confession before he was read his rights "was not voluntary," it "must disregard" the later confessions. The judge responded, without further explanation, "the answer is, no."
The federal appeals court concluded "the state trial court's instruction was clearly wrong" and "that the error was manifestly prejudicial." The court said Hernandez must be released or retried within a reasonable amount of time.
"For more than 13 years, Pedro Hernandez has been in prison for a crime he did not commit and based on a conviction that the Second Circuit has now made clear was obtained in clear violation of law," Hernandez’s appellate lawyer, Ted Diskant, at McDermott Will & Emery, said in a statement. "We are grateful the Court has now given Pedro a chance to get his life back, and I call upon the Manhattan District Attorney's Office to drop these misguided charges and focus their efforts where they belong: on finding those actually responsible for disappearance of Etan Patz."
Hernandez, a stock boy at a local convenience store, was accused of luring Patz to the basement with a bottle of soda. Patz vanished on the first day he was allowed to walk to the school bus stop alone on May 25, 1979.
His body has never been found.
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