A Day After Sending 2nd Deadlock Note, Jury In Etan Patz Murder Trial Presses On
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- A day after telling the judge for the second time that it is deadlocked and cannot reach a verdict, jurors in the Etan Patz murder case are returning Wednesday for a 16th day of deliberations.
Judge Maxwell Wiley responded to Tuesday's note by ordering the jury to continue deliberating.
He told jurors not to be concerned about the publicity surrounding the case -- and the inevitable scrutiny that would follow a verdict. He said any verdict based on the evidence would be a just one.
Jury In Etan Patz Murder Trial Presses On
Attorneys on both sides objected to Wiley's decision.
Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon said it sounded like the judge was telling jurors that any verdict would be acceptable, but she argued that the people of New York would rather see a second trial than an acquittal.
Harvey Fishbein, the attorney for the defendant, Pedro Hernandez, asked for a mistrial.
"The end result is they find themselves back in the jury room, and the jurors therefore say, 'The only way out is going to be a verdict,'" he told WCBS 880's Irene Cornell. "So we're concerned about that."
The jury is considering the case against Hernandez, 54, accused of killing 6-year-old Etan, who disappeared while walking to his SoHo bus stop in 1979.
Hernandez confessed to police that he offered Etan a soda to entice him into the basement of the SoHo bodega where he worked. Then, Hernandez said, he choked the boy and dumped him in a box with some curbside trash. Etan's body has never been found.
Defense lawyers say Hernandez's confession is fiction, dreamed up by a mentally ill man with a low IQ and a history of hallucinations and fueled by several hours of police questioning.
The defense also has pointed repeatedly to convicted child molester Jose Ramos as the real suspect.
Ramos has denied involvement, but a former federal prosecutor and FBI agent testified that Ramos told investigators he was "90 percent" sure a boy he took from a park was Etan, and Hernandez's former prison cellmate testified that Ramos admitted molesting the boy.
Ramos dated a woman who was hired to walk Etan home from school during a bus strike.
But prosecutors told jurors during closing arguments that while Ramos may be a convicted pedophile, investigators never found enough evidence to charge him in Etan's disappearance.
After listening to 10 weeks of testimony, jurors requested read-backs of testimonies and closing arguments, reviews of exhibits and even a computer with Microsoft Excel so they could organize their thoughts and a printer so they could distribute hard copies of the spreadsheet among themselves.
The jury is deciding whether Hernandez is guilty or not on three separate charges: second-degree murder, felony murder and kidnapping.
The two different murder charges result from different theories under the law. If the jury finds that Hernandez deliberately killed Etan, they will convict him on second-degree murder charges. If the panel decides Etan's death resulted from actions during the course of a kidnapping, they will find him guilty on the felony murder charge.
Each of the three charges is punishable by 25 years to life in prison.
Etan's photo was one of the first to be featured on milk cartons and the day he went missing became National Missing Children's Day.
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