The Manhattan juror who stood alone against convicting Pedro Hernandez in the 2015 murder trial over Etan Patz’s disappearance is sharply criticizing Monday’s US Supreme Court ruling reinstating Hernandez’s conviction.
Speaking to The Post, the former juror said he still believes prosecutors’ case against Hernandez rested on “a house of cards” and that the person responsible remains unidentified, more than four decades after the 6-year-old vanished from a SoHo street in 1979.
“I’m just sad for the [supreme court] outcome and sad for what it means for Pedro’s Hernandez and his family, and also I think it’s not the right closure for New York, and it’s not the right closure for the Patz family,” said the former juror, Adam Sirois.
Sirois was the only juror in Hernandez’s first trial who refused to vote guilty in Etan’s death. The boy’s disappearance drew national attention and helped make him one of the first missing children featured on milk cartons during the 1980s awareness campaigns.
Following the 2015 mistrial, Hernandez — who had been an 18-year-old bodega clerk when Etan disappeared — was tried again in 2017 and convicted.
Etan was formally declared dead in 2021, though his remains have never been recovered.
A federal appeals court later threw out Hernandez’s 2017 conviction on a technical issue tied to jury instructions about the first of his multiple confessions. Those statements included a disturbing videotaped admission in which Hernandez said he lured the 6-year-old into the bodega basement with the promise of a soda and then strangled him.
The initial confession, which was not recorded, occurred before Hernandez was arrested and advised of his Miranda rights, leading to its exclusion from evidence at the 2017 trial. During deliberations, jurors asked whether that meant they should disregard Hernandez’s other confessions as well, and the judge answered simply, “No.”
But the appeals court said the judge should have also made it clear to the jurors at the time that they needed to make up their own minds about Hernandez’s other confessions and for that reason, tossed his conviction.
The nation’s top court said in its ruling Monday that the lower court had no grounds to issue such a ruling, thus reinstating Hernandez’s conviction.
Sirois said the supreme court’s decision “seems very short and quick and presumptuous to me and not really a role for the supreme court to get involved in.”
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He said the judge’s response to the jury’s “very good question” was “really poor.”
“He should have given them the right to weigh their own decision on the validity of those subsequent confessions,” Sirois said.
“That could have swayed things the other way. It could have either resulted in a hung trial or perhaps even an acquittal.”
“Everything boiled down to the validity of the confessions — the original confession, and then any subsequent confessions,” he said, calling those statements “the strongest piece of evidence” presented in trial.
He said he remembers listening to the prosecution try to “tie this thing together with a bow” but always felt the evidence was incredibly flimsy.
“If one of these pieces of evidence don’t fit exactly the way the police are telling the story, the entire house of cards just collapses,” Sirois explained, saying that the police built the case “around a story that they got Pedro to tell them under duress.”
“Our jury deliberated for 18 days — and in the second trial, the jury deliberated for nine days… that doesn’t happen unless there’s a lot of doubt in the room,” Sirois said.
He called the failure to pursue onetime suspect Jose Ramos’ connection to Patz’s disappearance as “screwed up,” citing a “chilling” video of Ramos admitting to dating the 6-year-old’s babysitter at the time.
“How they could not pursue him at that time,” Sirois said — a suspicion also held by Patz’s parents.
“I think that’s an important piece of the puzzle — that for whatever reason, the district attorneys at the time chose not to pursue that.”
But Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Monday in hailing the latest ruling, “It is impossible to imagine the pain of losing a child, waiting so long for justice and having to race for more proceedings.”
“Today the Supreme Court restored the murder conviction, and I hope the Patz family can breathe a little easier.”
