Prosecutors will be confronted with some daunting hurdles while seeking justice for Etan Patz without his body as evidence, but legal experts say that they’re far from insurmountable.
Former federal prosecutor Tad DiBiase — an authority on “no body” cases — said that while a corpse provides “the best piece of evidence in a homicide,” the reported confessions of Pedro Hernandez may be enough to send him to the slammer.
Under state law, Hernandez’s videotaped statements to cops are not enough for a conviction, but the former bodega worker also told relatives that he “had done a bad thing and killed a child in New York,” according to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.
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Those remarks would provide “fairly damaging evidence” against Hernandez, said DiBiase, who runs the NoBodyCases.com Web site.
“People often argue that the cops beat a confession out of them,” he said. “It’s a lot harder to make that argument with a family member.”
Prominent Manhattan defense lawyer Joseph Tacopina cautioned that Hernandez may have falsely confessed because he has “some sort of a mental defect.”
But if he did, Tacopina said, “he picked the wrong case,” because “clearly there is a quest from both the family of this little boy and society to have resolution and closure.”