The sentencing of Mr. Hernandez, who was found guilty of the 1979 kidnapping and murder, brings to a close a case that bedeviled investigators for decades. The ruling clears the way for Pedro Hernandez to be sentenced on April 18 in State Supreme Court. He faces a maximum of 25 years to life
Citing the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed in 1868 and guaranteed equal protection under the law to all African Americans, Hernandez's lawyers claimed he had been deprived of equal protection because discrimination prevented him from being tried by a jury of his peers.
Pedro Hernandez was a Mexican drug dealer responsible for murdering Leroy Jethro Gibbs 's first wife Shannon Gibbs and their young daughter Kelly Gibbs.
Pedro Hernandez Found Guilty of Kidnapping and Killing Etan Patz in 1979. Pedro Hernandez, shown in court in 2012, confessed to luring the 6-year-old Etan Patz into the basement of a bodega and attacking him in 1979.
A Texas appeals court upheld Hernandez's conviction, but the case went to the Supreme Court. Lawyers for the State of Texas did not deny the charge of discrimination. Instead, they argued that such discrimination was not prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment, stating that it applied only to African Americans.
In 1954, in Hernandez v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the conviction of an agricultural labourer, Pete Hernandez, for murder should be overturned because Mexican Americans had been barred from participating in both the jury that indicted him and the jury that convicted him.
Pedro Hernandez, a former store clerk who told the police that he murdered Etan Patz as the boy headed to school in 1979, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison on Tuesday, bringing to a close a missing-child case that bedeviled investigators for decades and forever changed the way American parents protected their ...
Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk who confessed to luring 6-year-old Etan Patz into a basement and attacking him, was found guilty on Tuesday of murder and kidnapping, a long-awaited step toward closure in a case that bedeviled investigators for decades and changed forever the way parents watched over their ...
What had happened to one of Hernandez's attorneys in the Texas courthouse where Hernandez was tried that supported the “class apart” argument? When the attorney had tried to go to the restroom in the courthouse, he found it was segregated for both African Americans and Hispanics.
1954Hernandez v. Texas / Date decided
Etan Patz case: 1979 disappearance of NYC boy continues to haunt investigators. Etan Patz walked out of his New York City home headed for a school bus stop just two blocks away. The 6-year-old never made it to school that day in 1979 – and he's never been found.
Deceased (1972–1979)Etan Kalil Patz / Living or Deceased
Forty years after their 6-year-old son Etan Patz disappeared on a Soho street, Julie and Stan Patz have started a new chapter. The couple quietly sold their Prince Street loft this summer and relocated to Hawaii in recent weeks, The Post has learned.
Shannon, along with their eight-year-old daughter Kelly, was murdered by a Mexican drug dealer named Pedro Hernandez on the last official day of Operation Desert Storm. Gibbs was an active member of the Marine Corps at the time and was still overseas when they were killed.
Gibbs lost his first family to a tragic accident. Unfortunately, the family's happiness didn't have an opportunity to last long. After Shannon witnessed cartel member Pedro Hernandez murder a Marine, both Kelly and she were placed under protective custody.
Pedro Hernandez attended high school in the Camden, New Jersey, area before moving to Manhattan at the age of 18, sharing an apartment in the city's SoHo neighborhood with his older sister.
Hernandez only became a suspect 33 years after Etan’s disappearance because a family member called the police, apparently in response to the intense public interest in the case revived during the dig in the Soho basement in April.
UPDATE: In February 2017, Pedro Hernandez was found guilty of murdering and kidnapping Etan Patz and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
The Patz family, meanwhile, still lives just a block-and-a-half down Prince Street, making this short stretch in a now-posh neighborhood disturbingly spooky with the decades-long proximity of victim’s family, prime suspect’s family, and the crime scene.
The statement was remarkable, coming from someone who lived and worked at the epicenter of the search at the time the 6-year-old went missing in 1979.
Detectives, in fact, found Pedro Hernandez all the more convincing for the very reason that he so clearly seemed to be lying at the start of their interview with him. According to a knowledgeable source, Hernandez began to incriminate himself only after more than an hour of questioning. He initially told investigators that he could not identify ...
Hernandez still did not become a suspect when he quit working at the bodega one month later and moved back to New Jersey. A detective who visited the family in those days might have been told that Hernandez had become a changed person, jumping up and constantly peering out the window.
Pedro Hernandez Gets 25 Years to Life in Murder of Etan Patz. The sentencing of Mr. Hernandez, who was found guilty of the 1979 kidnapping and murder, brings to a close a case that bedeviled investigators for decades. By James C. McKinley Jr.
Pedro Hernandez, on trial in the kidnapping and death of the 6-year-old boy, is “an odd, limited and vulnerable man,” his lawyer said, arguing his innocence. By Rick Rojas. Advertisement. Continue reading the main story. Advertisement.
The First Etan Patz Jury Deadlocked After 18 Days. A New One Is on Day 9. Pedro Hernandez’s first trial on charges that he killed the 6-year-old boy in 1979 ended in a mistrial when the jury could not reach a verdict. The current panel resumes its deliberations on Tuesday.
Pedro Hernandez Found Guilty of Kidnapping and Killing Etan Patz in 1979. The verdict is a long-awaited step in solving the mystery that bedeviled investigators and forever changed the way parents watched over their children. The First Etan Patz Jury Deadlocked After 18 Days. A New One Is on Day 9.
Peter Hernandez, a Mexican-American agricultural worker , was convicted for the 1951 murder of Joe Espinosa, a man that he shot in cold blood at a bar in Edna, Texas. Hernandez's pro bono legal team, including Gustavo C. GarcĂa, appealed the ruling, arguing that he was being discriminated against because there were no Mexicans in the jury ...
Chief Justice Earl Warren and the rest of the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of Hernandez, and required he be retried by a jury composed without discrimination against Mexican Americans.
Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954), was a landmark case, "the first and only Mexican-American civil-rights case heard and decided by the United States Supreme Court during the post-World War II period.". In a unanimous ruling, the court held that Mexican Americans and all other nationality groups in the United States have equal protection ...
Texas to the Supreme Court, challenging Jim Crow -style discrimination. Aired on PBS on February 23, 2009.
Hernandez's defense lawyers demonstrated that, although numerous Mexican Americans were citizens and had otherwise qualified for jury duty in Jackson County, during the previous 25 years no Mexican Americans (or, more precisely, no one with a Hispanic surname) were among the 6,000 persons chosen to serve on juries.
Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk who confessed to luring 6-year-old Etan Patz into a basement and attacking him, was found guilty on Tuesday of murder and kidnapping, a long-awaited step toward closure in a case that bedeviled investigators for decades and changed forever the way parents watched over their children.
Mr. Hernandez’s lawyers tried to undermine the credibility of his confessions, saying he was the only witness against himself and an unreliable one at that. They described Mr. Hernandez as having a low I.Q. and a personality disorder that made it difficult for him to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
Pedro Hernandez, shown in court in 2012, confessed to luring the 6-year-old Etan Patz into the basement of a bodega and attacking him in 1979.
Hernandez described encountering a boy on a sidewalk outside the bodega and asking him if he wanted a soda. Mr. Hernandez told investigators he had led the boy to the basement and started to choke him.
His lawyers depicted Mr. Hernandez as struggling with a mental illness that loosened his grip on reality. They said he had schizotypal personality disorder, a condition marked by symptoms that included severe paranoia, social anxiety and unusual beliefs.
A look back at investigations surrounding the 1979 disappearance of a 6-year-old boy in New York City, and the trials of a man who, decades later, has been convicted in his killing. A member of a church group testified that Mr. Hernandez fell to his knees in tears, saying he had attacked a child. Mr.
Louis Lanzano for The New York Times. The authorities turned their attention to Mr. Hernandez, who lived in a small New Jersey town near Philadelphia, after his brother-in-law called detectives in 2012 to share his suspicion that he could be responsible.
Citing the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed in 1868 and guaranteed equal protection under the law to all African Americans, Hernandez's lawyers claimed he had been deprived of equal protection because discrimination prevented him from being tried by a jury of his peers.
Hernandez was convicted of killing a man in cold blood in Jackson County, Texas, but his legal team, which was drawn mostly from one of the oldest Latino civil rights groups in the nation, the League of United Latin American Citizens, appealed. They pored through the records of jury selections in Jackson County, ...
In Hernandez v. Texas, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all racial and ethnic groups facing discrimination, ...
The Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, meeting in closed session, begin their hearings into the dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur by President Harry S. Truman. The hearings served as a sounding board for MacArthur and his extremist views on how the Cold War ...read more
The Court held that Mexican Americans were “a class apart,” a distinct group entitled to the same constitutional protections as other minorities under the Fourteenth Amendment. Pete Hernandez received a new trial with a jury that included Mexican Americans, and was again found guilty of murder.
In 1950, Pete Hernandez was charged with murder and found guilty by an all-white jury in Jackson County, Texas.
In the first case to be tried by Mexican American attorneys before the U.S. Supreme Court, Garcia argued that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed protection not only on the basis of race but also class.
The then-34-year-old was sentenced to life in prison without opportunity for parole in June 2018.
Fernandez's son, Gabriel, was found unconscious on May 22, 2013, after his mother called 911 to report an incident, during which she claimed Gabriel had hit his head on a dresser. The paramedics did find him unconscious, but they also found that his skull was cracked, three of his ribs were broken, his teeth were bashed out with a bat, ...
Why did Pearl Fernandez get a lesser sentence than Isauro Aguirre? When Fernandez and Aguirre were initially charged, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office sought the death penalty against them both. They were indicted by a grand jury on a charge of murder and a special circumstance of torture.
Both Aguirre and Fernandez also covered Gabriel in makeup to prevent others from seeing his bruises outside of the home. Advertisement.
Fernandez was evaluated during her trial by Deborah S. Miora, a clinical psychologist, who concluded that she had severely limited intellectual capacity which left her "virtually unable to use thought to guide her behavior and temper her emotional reactions.”. It also came to light that she has depressive disorder, developmental disability, ...
During the trial, it was revealed that Aguirre bound, whipped, and gagged Gabriel, as well as forced him to eat cat litter and feces.
Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954), was a landmark case, "the first and only Mexican-American civil-rights case heard and decided by the United States Supreme Court during the post-World War II period." In a unanimous ruling, the court held that Mexican Americans and all other nationality groups in the United States have equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The ruling was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. This was the first case in whic…
Peter Hernandez, a Mexican-American agricultural worker, was convicted for the 1951 murder of Joe Espinosa, a man that he shot in cold blood at a bar in Edna, Texas. Hernandez's pro bono legal team, including Gustavo C. GarcĂa, appealed the ruling, arguing that he was being discriminated against because there were no Mexicans in the jury that convicted him. They hoped to challenge what they described as "the systematic exclusion of persons of Mexican origin from all types of j…
Chief Justice Earl Warren and the rest of the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of Hernandez, and required he be retried by a jury composed without discrimination against Mexican Americans.
The court omitted the focus of race by declaring that other factors influence whether or not a group may need constitutional protection. To determine if discriminatory factors were present i…
The ruling was an extension of protection in the Civil Rights Movement to nationality groups within the country and an acknowledgement that, in certain times and places, groups other than blacks (African Americans) could be discriminated against. The ultimate effect of this ruling was that the protection of the 14th Amendment was ruled to cover any national or ethnic groups of the United States for which discrimination could be proved.
• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 347
• Jury trial
• Soltero, Carlos R. (2006). "Hernandez v. Texas (1954) and the exclusion of Mexican-Americans and grand juries". Latinos and American Law: Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. pp. 37–47. ISBN 0-292-71411-4.
• Olivas, Michael A., ed. (2006). "Colored men" and "hombres aquĂ" : Hernández v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican-American Lawyering. Hispanic Civil Rights Series. Foreword by Mark Tushnet. Houston, TX: Arte PĂşblico Pre…
• Text of Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954) is available from: Justia Library of Congress
• Hernandez v. State of Texas case, University of Texas School of Law archive
• Hernández v. the State of Texas from the Handbook of Texas Online