The 6-3 ruling reverses a federal appeals court decision that had threatened to send the nearly five-decade-old case to a third trial.
The Supreme Court on Monday reinstated the murder conviction of Pedro Hernandez in the 1979 killing of 6-year-old Etan Patz, ending a years-long legal battle that had threatened to send the case to a third trial.
The court ruled 6-3 in an unsigned opinion, with the three liberal justices dissenting. The decision reversed a 2025 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which had overturned Hernandez’s conviction on grounds that a trial judge gave jurors an inadequate answer to a question during deliberations.
The Supreme Court found that the Second Circuit had overstepped its authority under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a federal law designed to limit how broadly federal courts can review state criminal convictions. “The Second Circuit exceeded its authority in holding that Hernandez is entitled to relief,” the justices wrote.
Hernandez, now 64, has been serving a sentence of 25 years to life in prison since his 2017 conviction on charges of murder and kidnapping.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg praised the ruling. “This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family and will continue to stand by this important conviction,” he said in a statement. Hernandez’s attorneys Harvey Fishbein and Alice Fontier said they were “terribly disappointed” and maintained that “an innocent man is in jail for a crime that he did not commit.”
Etan disappeared on May 25, 1979, while walking two blocks from his SoHo apartment to his school bus stop in Lower Manhattan — the first time his parents had allowed him to make that trip alone. He was six years old. His body was never found, and he was declared legally dead in 2001.
Hernandez was working at a nearby bodega at the time of the disappearance but did not become a suspect until 2012, when his brother-in-law contacted investigators. Hernandez confessed to strangling the boy and discarding his remains, but his lawyers argued the confession was false, produced after roughly seven hours of police questioning before he was read his Miranda rights. Hernandez has been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder and has an IQ of around 70. He repeated his confession on tape at least twice.
A grand jury indicted Hernandez in November 2012. His first trial ended in a mistrial in 2015 when jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. A second jury convicted him in February 2017 after nine days of deliberations.
The legal question that ultimately reached the Supreme Court arose during those 2017 deliberations. Jurors asked whether, if they concluded Hernandez’s initial pre-Miranda confession was involuntary, they were required to disregard his subsequent confessions as well. The trial judge responded simply: “the answer is no.” The Second Circuit ruled in July 2025 that the question deserved a more complete response, one that included the possibility of discounting all the confessions, and overturned the conviction.
Bragg had described that rationale as a “slender reed” that dismissed a five-month trial featuring 66 witnesses. After the Second Circuit’s ruling, Bragg’s office announced plans to retry Hernandez and a judge declined a defense motion to dismiss the case in April 2026. With Monday’s Supreme Court decision, the retrial is no longer necessary.
Etan Patz’s case transformed how the United States handles missing children. His face appeared on milk cartons in one of the earliest and most recognized campaigns of its kind. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25, the anniversary of his disappearance, as National Missing Children’s Day.
