Mainstream outlets this week focused on two high-profile criminal‑justice developments: Manhattan prosecutors announced they will retry Pedro Hernandez in the 1979 Etan Patz killing after the Second Circuit overturned his 2017 conviction over jury‑instruction errors, with a Dec. 1 hearing and a June 1 deadline for a new trial or release; and in Louisiana a judge vacated Jimmie Duncan’s conviction in a toddler’s death and granted bail amid revelations of flawed forensic evidence, including problematic bite‑mark handling by dentist Michael West and involvement of pathologist Steven Hayne. Coverage gave the procedural status, key dates, and basic factual outlines of the cases and the prosecutors’ and judges’ positions.
Missing from much mainstream coverage were crucial contextual and historical details reported in alternative sources: that Hernandez’s case rested entirely on confessions with no physical evidence and that other suspects (notably Jose Antonio Ramos) had long been considered in Etan Patz’s disappearance; the broader research on false confessions—especially that 69% of DNA‑exonerated people with intellectual disabilities were wrongfully convicted because of false confessions—and the vulnerabilities of people with disabilities to coerced admissions; the systemic racial disparities and official‑misconduct patterns (e.g., Black people make up 53% of exonerations since 1989 and Black Americans are disproportionately likely to be wrongfully convicted); and the well‑documented unreliability of bite‑mark evidence and specific histories tying experts like Michael West to multiple wrongful convictions. No contrarian viewpoints were identified in the materials reviewed.