NEW YORK—The man convicted in the 1979 killing of 6-year-old Etan Patz was awarded a new trial Monday as a federal appeals court overturned the guilty verdict in one of the nation’s most notorious missing child cases.
Pedro Hernandez has been serving 25 years to life in prison since his 2017 conviction. He had been arrested in 2012 after a decades-long, haunting search for answers in Etan’s disappearance, which happened on the first day he was allowed to walk alone to his school bus stop in New York City.
The appeals court said the trial judge gave a “clearly wrong” and “manifestly prejudicial” response to a jury note during Hernandez’s 2017 trial—his second. His first trial ended in a jury deadlock in 2015. His lawyers said he was innocent….