A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, the New York man found guilty in 2017 of murdering six-year-old Etan Patz, whose disappearance in 1979 became one of the most infamous child abduction cases in U.S. history.
Etan vanished in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood on May 25, 1979—the very first day his parents allowed him to walk to the school bus stop alone. His body was never found, but decades later, in 2012, Hernandez, then a former bodega worker, confessed to luring the boy into a basement with the promise of a soda, before killing him and discarding his body.
However, on Monday, a three-judge panel ruled that Hernandez’s conviction must be vacated due to improper jury instructions that undermined his constitutional rights. At the center of the appeal was…
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