Exclusive | Lone holdout juror in first Etan Patz trial rips top-court ruling upholding later conviction: Not the right closure for NY

The lone holdout Manhattan juror in the 2015 Etan Patz murder trial is blasting Monday’s US Supreme Court decision to restore the conviction of Pedro Hernandez.The former juror told The Post he remains convinced that the state’s case against Hernandez was built on “a house of cards” and that the real killer is still out there — decades after the 6-year-old boy’s tragic disappearance from a SoHo street in 1979.“I’m just sad for the [supreme court] outcome and sad for what it means for Pedro’s Hernandez and his family, and also I think it’s not the right closure for New York, and it’s not the right closure for the Patz family,” said the ex-panelist, Adam Sirois.Sirois was the only member of the jury at Hernandez’s first trial to refuse to find him guilty in the death of Etan, whose national-headline-grabbing disappearance led him to become one of the first missing children whose faces were put on milk cartons as part of a campaign in the ’80s.After his 2015 mistrial, Hernandez, an 18-year-old bodega clerk at the time of Etan’s disappearance, was put on trial again in 2017 and found guilty.Etan was officially declared dead in 2021, although his body was never found.A federal appeals court then ended up tossing Hernandez’s 2017 conviction over a technicality involving jury instructions about the first of his many confessions — which included a chilling videotaped admission to fatally strangling the 6-year-old after luring him into the bodega basement with a promise of a soda.That first confession, which was not videotaped, was made before Hernandez was arrested and read his Miranda rights, so it was tossed from evidence at his 2017 trial.

When the jury asked during deliberations if that meant it should not consider any of Hernandez’s other confessions, the judge simply responded, “No.”But the appeals court said the judge should have also made it clear to the jurors at the time that they needed to make up their own minds about H...