A mistrial has been declared in the Etan Patz case after the jury of five men and seven women said for the third time that they cannot reach a verdict.
The New York Times noted that the mistrial was declared on Friday after weeks of deliberations.
This was the third and final time that the jurors said that they could not come to a decision.
As previously reported, last week the jury members told Justice Maxwell Wiley that they could not reach a unanimous decision. He gave them an Allen charge and asked that they keep deliberating. They came back again and said they were still deadlocked, but he requested they take another crack at it. Ultimately, however, they remained a hung jury.
The jurors had been deliberating to decide the fate of Pedro Hernandez, who confessed in 2012 to killing the six-year-old Patz back in 1979. He later retracted his statements and his lawyers argued that he suffers from a mental illness and has an IQ of 70.
The body of the young boy has never been found and he was declared legally dead in 2001. His face was the first of the missing ever featured on a milk carton.
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