The U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 on June 22, 2026, to reinstate Pedro Hernandez's conviction for the kidnapping and felony murder of six-year-old Etan Patz, reversing a Second Circuit ruling that had thrown out the verdict in 2025.

Hernandez had been sentenced to 25-years-to-life by the trial court following his conviction on both charges. The case traces back to May 1979, when Etan Patz disappeared after walking to his school bus stop alone in lower Manhattan — one of the first missing-child cases to receive sustained national attention and a catalyst for changes in how law enforcement handles such disappearances.

The Second Circuit had overturned Hernandez's conviction in 2025, finding that the trial judge had incorrectly handled aspects of the proceedings. The nature of that handling — procedural error rather than evidentiary insufficiency — meant the government could seek reinstatement rather than face the double-jeopardy bar that would apply had the appellate court found the evidence legally inadequate to sustain the verdict. The Supreme Court's summary reversal disposed of the question without full briefing or oral argument, a mechanism the Court reserves for cases it considers sufficiently clear on the law to require no extended deliberation.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg issued a statement welcoming the decision, framing it as an affirmation of the original trial verdict. The 6-3 alignment tracks closely with the Court's established ideological fault lines, though the summary nature of the order means no majority opinion was issued explaining the justices' precise reasoning — leaving the three dissenters' objections, whatever their basis, equally unexplained in the public record.

The Hernandez prosecution was itself a decades-long ordeal. Patz disappeared in 1979, but Hernandez — a bodega worker who had lived in the neighborhood at the time — was not arrested until 2012, following a renewed investigative push. His first trial in 2015 ended in a hung jury. A retrial produced the conviction that has now, after the Second Circuit's intervention and the Supreme Court's reversal, been restored.

The procedural history matters for what comes next. Because the Second Circuit's reversal rested on trial error rather than insufficiency of evidence, Hernandez has no automatic right to a new trial flowing from today's ruling — the conviction stands. Whether he pursues further collateral challenges, and on what grounds, will determine whether this closes the litigation chapter or opens another.

For practitioners watching appellate procedure, the Court's willingness to summarily reverse the Second Circuit signals impatience with the circuit's trial-error analysis, even absent a fully reasoned opinion. Summary reversals carry precedential weight commensurate with their brevity — which is to say, limited — but they do communicate the majority's view that the lower court's reasoning was not a close call.

The Patz case occupied an unusual place in American legal and cultural memory long before it reached this resolution. Etan's image appeared on milk cartons. His disappearance helped drive the creation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and pushed Congress toward the Missing Children Act of 1982. The length of time between the crime and the conviction — more than three decades — and the subsequent appellate reversal and now reinstatement compressed into a few years illustrate how cold-case prosecutions, often dependent on confession evidence and circumstantial corroboration, generate appellate vulnerability even after juries convict.

Hernandez's 25-years-to-life sentence, now restored, means parole eligibility governed by New York's sentencing framework. Given the timeline of his incarceration, the practical consequences of today's ruling will be felt most immediately in any pending appeals or post-conviction motions that had been held in abeyance pending the Supreme Court's action.