"Jurors in the second Etan Patz murder trial knew that members of the
first jury were often in the audience and seated next to a murdered
child’s father, lawyers for the killer have confirmed.
Their filing — a motion to toss
Pedro Hernandez’s conviction
for the murder and kidnapping of 6-year-old Etan in 1979 — says an
alternate juror verified troubling information previously reported in
press accounts of the Feb. 14 guilty verdict. Alternate juror Felix Nieves said, “the jurors were aware of the
identities and presence of the jurors from the prior trial during the
course of the trial,” according to an investigator’s account of the talk
in a post-conviction motion filed Wednesday. The probe by Hernandez’s lawyers followed reports in Newsday and
DNAinfo that said Juror No. 9, Michael Castellon, knew who the previous
jurors were from court officers. “The statements made by Mr. Castellon to the media, and as confirmed by
Mr. Nieves, raise serious issues of impropriety and of undue
prejudicial influence that inevitably affected the deliberations and the
outcome of the current trial,” Hernandez lawyer Alice Fontier wrote in
the motion. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley had ordered that all mentions of the first trial be excluded from the second one. Whenever the first trial was discussed in front of the second jury, the
lawyers were supposed to refer to it as a “prior proceeding.” The first trial in the famous case ended with a mistrial by hung jury
in May 2015 when a single juror refused to vote guilty because of what
he described as a lack of proof. In 2012, Hernandez confessed to the longtime cold case, saying he
choked little Etan lifeless and discarded his body in a SoHo alley near
the bodega where he worked. Hernandez’s defense argued that he was too mentally ill to deliver
reliable information and that he had delusions and difficulty parsing
reality from fantasy. They also blamed another suspect. “The verdict must be vacated because the court officers improperly
informed the jurors that the jurors from prior trial were present in the
courtroom and seated with the Patz family,” Fontier argued. “In this highly emotional case, the presence of the prior jurors and
their close obvious relationship with the Patz family conveyed the
message that they believed in Mr. Hernandez’s guilt,” she added."
week.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/pedro-hernandez-lawyers-seek-toss-etan-patz-murder-verdict-article-1.2999319