2nd Day Of Jury Deliberations Wraps In Etan Patz Murder Trial
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- No verdict was reached Thursday in the Etan Patz murder trial, after a second day of deliberations.
Jurors received the case against 54-year-old Pedro Hernandez – the man accused of luring and killing the 6-year-old boy in SoHo nearly 36 years ago – Wednesday afternoon.
As CBS2's Jessica Schneider reported, the jury around 11 a.m. Thursday sent a note asking for another chance to hear the testimony of Hernandez's ex-wife.
"We the jury request… all defendant's medical records… read back of Daisy's entire testimony," the note said.
Daisy Rivera is the wife of Pedro Hernandez. They first met when she was 16 and married soon after. But she said before they wed in 1982, Hernandez told her he had a dark secret he needed to share.
The court reporter read Rivera's testimony.
"He was somewhere in New York….and someone approached him. He never said his name. He said he was a young man….a white guy, a person," Rivera said in the testimony. "This person approached him and he felt violated. He's telling me he strangled him and he put him in the dumpster, and he covered him with plastic bags or he threw something over him; over the body."
Later in their marriage, Rivera testified she found part of the missing poster for Etan with her husband's possessions. At the time, Hernandez explained to her that it was something that had happened in the neighborhood when he worked there a few years before.
Defense attorney Harvey Fishbein said Rivera did not recall that with the police.
"This life-changing event was not mentioned when she was first questioned by the police," Fishbein said. "They spent four hours with her and showed her the same pictures, and she never said, 'Oh yes, those are pictures I had seen.'"
Rivera gave no other details, and never told police, until Hernandez was arrested in 2012 – at which point the two were already divorced.
Hernandez told several people versions of the same story in the late 1970s and 1980s, but defense attorneys argued the inconsistencies prove he is delusional.
Hernandez's current wife and daughter, Becky, sat in court for the second day Thursday as they anxiously awaited a verdict from the jury.
"There's a lot for them to go over," Fishbein said. "This was a 10 week trial, and I didn't expect them to go into the room, look at each other, and walk back out."
Five women and seven men will decide 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.
Hernandez was a clerk at a corner bodega in SoHo that Etan visited often. He is accused of luring the little boy into the bodega basement with promises of a soda and then strangling him.
Etan's body was never found, but a judge declared him legally dead in 2001. Hernandez had never been considered a suspect — his name appears only once in law enforcement paperwork at the time Etan disappeared.
But prosecutors presented evidence that Hernandez confessed several times to church group members in the years following the crime and then to police in 2012.
The judge told jurors they must not go into their deliberations with a closed mind, saying to be open to reason and listen to the opinion of others, 1010 WINS' Juliet Papa reported.
The defense says Hernandez is mentally ill, has a very low IQ and can't tell fantasy from reality.
Defense attorneys also said prosecutors have the wrong man on trial. The defense has pointed repeatedly to convicted child molester Jose Ramos as the real suspect. But prosecutors told jurors during closing arguments that while Ramos may be a convicted pedophile, he is not guilty in this case.
Etan's photo was one of the first on milk cartons. The day he went missing, May 25, became National Missing Children's Day.
Jury deliberations were to resume Friday.
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