"The retrial of bodega worker Pedro
Hernandez for the long-unsolved 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz will
begin right after Labor Day, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell
Wiley ordered on Tuesday. The
trial of Hernandez, 55, of Maple Shade, New Jersey, on charges that he
kidnapped and murdered 6-year-old Etan ended in an 11-1 deadlock for
conviction last year. The scheduling of a retrial was delayed by defense
lawyer Harvey Fishbein’s back problems. He has been in custody since 2012."
See Wikipedia report: "On May 24, 2012, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced that a man was in custody who had implicated himself in Etan's disappearance.[18]
According to The New York Times, a law enforcement official identified the man as Pedro Hernandez of Maple Shade, New Jersey, age 51, and said that he had confessed to strangling Etan.[19] According to a 2009 book about the case, After Etan, Etan had a dollar and had told his parents he planned to buy a soda to drink with his lunch.[18] Hernandez was an 18-year-old convenience store worker in a neighborhood bodega at the time of Etan's disappearance.[20] Hernandez said that he later threw Etan's remains into the garbage.[21] Hernandez was charged with second-degree murder. According to a New York Times report from May 25, 2012, the police at that time had no physical evidence to corroborate his confession.[22] Statements in May 2012 by Hernandez's sister, Nina Hernandez, and Tomas Rivera, leader of a Charismatic Christianity group at St. Anthony of Padua, a Roman Catholic church in Camden, New Jersey, indicated that Hernandez may have publicly confessed to murdering Etan in the presence of fellow parishioners in the early 1980s. According to Hernandez's sister, it was an "open family secret that he had confessed in the church."[23] A New York grand jury indicted Hernandez on November 14, 2012, on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.[24] His lawyer has stated that Hernandez was diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, which includes hallucinations.[24][25] The lawyer has also said his client has a low IQ of around 70, “at the border of intellectual disability.”[26] On December 12, 2012, Hernandez pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one count of kidnapping in a New York court.[27] In April 2013, Harvey Fishbein, a defense lawyer for Pedro Hernandez, filed a motion to dismiss the case, citing that Hernandez's "confession in one of the nation's most notorious child disappearances was false, peppered with questionable claims and made after almost seven hours of police questioning".[28] The next month, however, Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley ruled that the evidence was "legally sufficient to support the charges" and that the case could move forward. He also ordered a hearing to determine whether the defendant's statements could be used at trial.[29] Hernandez had a hearing in September 2014 about whether his statements made prior to police giving him his Miranda warning were legally admissible at trial. This would be influenced by whether he felt free to leave during the time before he was informed of his Miranda rights. The hearing was also to determine whether he understood the significance of the Miranda rights and was competent to waive them when he did so. This was significant because it would decide whether any statements made after that point by Hernandez were legally admissible at trial. The actual truth or falsehood of the statements was not the focus of the hearing;[26] rather, the question of the statements' truthfulness was to be discussed in the trial, which began on January 5, 2015.[30] The case was tried in Room 733, 111 Centre Street, New York, New York. It resulted in a mistrial in May 2015 after the jurors deadlocked 11-1 for conviction.[8]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Etan_Patz
