The Supreme Court on Monday backed Manhattan prosecutors’ bid to revive Pedro Hernandez’s conviction for the 1979 murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz, who was never found, in the infamous disappearance that the court recalled “once captured the Nation’s attention.”

A federal appeals court panel sided with Hernandez last year in ruling that a jury instruction at his trial violated Supreme Court precedent. The panel said the state had to release him or retry him, setting the stage for what could have been a third trial after the first one ended in a hung jury.

But the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority on Monday reversed the appeals court’s ruling. The majority said the appellate panel ran afoul of the federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, or AEDPA, which imposes strict limits on federal courts’ power to grant relief for state prisoners. The high court majority has consistently applied that law to rule against defendants over the years, with this latest instance happening to come in a high-profile case stemming from the disappearance that, as one news account put it, “led to a generation of anxious parents and changes in how law enforcement responds to missing children.”

The Supreme Court’s reversal came in an unsigned “per curiam” opinion, meaning no single justice claimed authorship. Such unsigned rulings are typical for these sorts of summary reversals.

“The panel’s opinion appears to reflect serious doubt about the reliability of Hernandez’s confessions, but AEDPA does not allow a federal habeas court to disturb a state-court conviction based on such an evaluation of the evidence,” the high court majority said.

Though the ruling is unsigned, we know there was a split because the court’s three Democratic-appointed justices — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — noted they would have denied the state’s petition. They didn’t explain why.

The majority recounted that the case had gone cold but was revived in 2012, when Hernandez’s brother-in-law said the defendant had spoken about his involvement in Patz’s disappearance and suspected murder. Calling Hernandez “a man with a low IQ and a history of mental illness,” the court said he was first questioned without being given Miranda warnings and eventually confessed to strangling Patz and dumping his body in an alley behind a bodega. He was then read his rights and subsequently made confessions.

When the jury that convicted him deliberated at his trial, it asked the judge whether it had to disregard his subsequent confessions if it found that his initial one was involuntary. The judge said no. The federal appellate panel said that was so egregious as to warrant releasing Hernandez or granting him a new trial.

The Supreme Court majority disagreed. “No clearly established federal law required the trial court to instruct the jury” the way the panel thought was required, the high court majority said in its reversal.

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