Manhattan prosecutors are planning to tweak their case for the retrial of Etan Patz’s accused killer, including two additional psychiatric experts and taking jurors on a tour of the crime scene, it was revealed in court Wednesday.
New lead prosecutor Joel Seidemann — who replaces Joan Illuzi-Orbon, who left the DA’s office in an unsuccessful bid to be elected Staten island DA — did not elaborate on the extra witnesses.
Prosecutors also filed a motion asking that jurors, “be allowed to physically examine the scene of the incident, that is physically go to the scene of the neighborhood,” Justice Maxwell Wiley said in court.
The judge said he’d take the request into consideration.
At the previous trial jurors were shown a lengthy video of the Soho neighborhood, including the bodega where prosecutors argued that defendant Pedro Hernandez strangled the child, and another storefront two blocks away where he discarded the body.
That trial ended in May with a deadlocked jury after the panel deliberated more than three weeks voting 11 to 1 in favor of guilt. Five of the jurors came to court Wednesday and sat with the victim’s father Stan Patz in a show of support.
Etan Patz vanished from a Soho street the first time he was allowed to walked alone to the school bus stop on May 25, 1979.
Hernandez, 54, confessed to authorities in 2012 after cops picked him up based on a tip from his brother-in-law. His lawyer Harvey Fishbein argued that the admission was false and coerced.