Many reporters asked me why I came to the opening arguments at the re-trial of Pedro Hernandez on Wednesday. The simple answer is that I wanted to see if the prosecution had any new evidence to support their claim that Pedro Hernandez murdered Etan Patz in 1979.
And the answer is no.
They have nothing new and nothing that corroborates the story they told in the first trial.
I use the word “story” because that is all the police have — a story elicited from a mentally ill man who is the only witness against himself in a case that is 37 years old. And no evidence to corroborate it.
Under New York law, a person cannot be convicted based solely on their confession; no matter how many times they say it. I waited three months in the first trial for a shred of evidence linking Hernandez to the crime.
It never arrived.
I also attended the retrial because I knew that five of my fellow jurors would be there and it was important that both sides be represented publicly.
I did find a new approach by the defense team, though, with much more emphasis on Jose Ramos. Whereas there is nothing that connects Hernandez to the Patz family in any way, Ramos was directly linked to them through his relationship with their babysitter, whose 4-year-old son he was sexually abusing at the time Etan disappeared.
I also liked the new focus on the police search of the bodega, which did not produce Etan’s school bag. This is the school bag that Hernandez allegedly threw behind the walk-in freezer in the basement.
The fact that prosecutors say the police did a thorough investigation of the SoHo area but would not have looked behind the freezer of the bodega is simply unbelievable.
If the police had found that bag I would have voted guilty.
Adam Sirois works for a New York medical research foundation. He was the sole holdout juror voting not guilty at the first trial of Pedro Hernandez.