Many are frustrated they were not able to reach a verdict in the first trial
By Jennifer Peltz
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - They spent four emotionally draining, inconclusive months on jury duty in one of America's most notorious missing-child cases. But over a year after hitting a deadlock, some jurors now feel a duty not to let it go.
Eight former jurors and alternates were in the audience of a New York courtroom last week to listen, again, to opening statements in the retrial of Pedro Hernandez in the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy who vanished on his morning walk to his school bus stop.
Some ex-jurors have shown up for even routine court hearings. A half-dozen held a remembrance for Etan in his Manhattan neighborhood last year. A handful plan to attend as much of the retrial as they can.
"We ate, drank, slept this trial" for months, alternate C.J. Holm said as she headed to court one day.
"It really got under our skin, and we want to see it through."
Their quest is an unconventional measure of the impact of a case that has already had plenty. Etan's disappearance fueled a cultural shift toward more protective parenting and helped spur law enforcement advances in tracking vanished children. The anniversary is now National Missing Children's Day.
Suspect Pedro Hernandez didn't come to light until 2012, when he confessed. His defense says he's mentally ill and only imagined committing the crime.
Several former jurors say they're back because they feel connected to a case they know in such detail and are frustrated they couldn't reach a verdict after 18 days of deliberation. Many want show support for Etan's family.
"We, emotionally, do have to be here," says ex-juror Joan Brooks, who works in finance.
But with former jurors from both sides of the 11-1 deadlock turning up, the retrial is also re-airing their contrasting takes on the case. The two sides sit on opposite sides of the Manhattan courtroom and sometimes make sequential stops before reporters in the hallway.
Outside court, members of the majority stress that 11 people found enough evidence to convict. "We felt very strongly then, and we feel strongly now, that it's a very strong case," former juror Cynthia Cueto said.
Adam Sirois, the lone holdout, still feels just as strongly that there's reasonable doubt about Hernandez's guilt, and he's determined to show up and speak out if his former cohorts are doing the same.
"If anything, I've gotten stronger in the conviction that what I did was the right thing to do in this case," said Sirois, whose position some fellow jurors portrayed - wrongly, he says - as attention-seeking. " ... It's just very personal to me now."
Jurors have occasionally remained engaged in cases after mistrials before, though experts say it seems unusual to see ex-jurors from both sides of a deadlock.
One New York ex-juror, who got menacing messages that spurred a mistrial in a larceny case against two former top Tyco International Ltd. executives, attended key days in the 2005 retrial that led to their conviction. After a deadlock in Pittsburgh celebrity pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht's 2008 fraud trial, five pro-acquittal jurors socialized with him and planned to attend his retrial, until prosecutors dropped the case.
Sometimes, "jurors who don't reach a verdict feel incomplete," says Shari Seidman Diamond, a Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor who studies juries.
In Hernandez's first trial, jurors in the majority argued his confession was credibly detailed and undergirded by remarks he made years before about having killed a child. Sirois felt another, longtime suspect was a compelling alternative, and the juror couldn't get past his concerns about Hernandez's mental health, low IQ and hourslong interrogation before his video-recorded confession.
The panel had days' worth of testimony read back and even created spreadsheets with timelines to try to reach a verdict.
"It was very frustrating ... to work at something for 18 days and have no resolution, when we believed there was plenty of evidence to get resolution," said ex-juror Jennifer O'Connor, an event manager. She has attended the retrial and many court dates.
For Sirois, a fundraiser with a public health background, the trial sparked a new interest in examining the criminal justice system and its treatment of mentally ill or otherwise vulnerable people. He has written opinion pieces about the case and hopes to make a documentary about it.
"It draws you in," he says, "because it's so human on many levels, and so horrible on many levels."
Published: Mon, Oct 31, 2016
