DA: Let Patz jury tour scene
PROSECUTORS WANT to have the next Etan Patz jury get a first-hand tour of the SoHo streets the boy disappeared from 36 years ago.
The request made by the district attorney’s office was mentioned at a brief hearing Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court in advance of accused abductor Pedro Hernandez’s second trial, slated to start in late February.
“The people have filed a request that the jury in the trial be allowed to examine, physically, the scene of the incident and physically go to the SoHo neighborhood,” Justice Maxwell Wiley said.
Wiley said he will take the request “under consideration” and has not yet issued a ruling. In May, the first Hernandez trial resulted in a hung jury and mistrial after 18 grueling days of deliberations. In the end, a single holdout said there was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt to find Hernandez guilty.
The majority of the panel members — who sat through months of testimony — was convinced by Hernandez’s detailed confession to fatally choking the boy and discarding his tiny body in a produce box in an alley.
But lawyers for the former bodega clerk say his low IQ and mental illness made him prone to adopting the false belief that he was responsible. They also pointed to another man, Jose Ramos, as the likely suspect.
The first jury was not taken to tour the scene, and the bodega has been shuttered for decades. Instead, jurors were shown a video walk-through of what prosecutors say was the boy’s path from his Prince St. home to his bus stop in 1979, on the same corner as the bodega.
Hernandez’s lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, said he is not opposed to the tour as long as it is “not misleading.”