Charles Flores argued that his conviction was improperly based on testimony from a witness who changed her recollection after hypnosis by an investigator.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected Texas death row inmate Charles Flores’ efforts to force the state’s highest criminal court to reconsider his appeal.
The Supreme Court denied the petition without comment.
Flores argued that his 1999 conviction should be overturned under the Texas “junk science” law because testimony from a key witness was improperly influenced by hypnosis performed by a police officer who was investigating the murder of 64-year-old Elizabeth “Betty” Black in Dallas County.
The Texas junk science law permits inmates to challenge convictions that relied on outdated or disproven scientific procedures or practices.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had declined to review Flores’ junk science claims, saying he failed to meet the state law’s requirement that new evidence be previously unavailable, among other standards. The Supreme Court rejected Flores’ request to order the Texas court to reconsider the appeal.
Jill Barganier, one of Black’s neighbors, saw two men enter Black’s house the morning of the murder. Hoping to improve her recollection, Barganier asked investigators to place her under hypnosis. Alfredo Roen Serna, a Farmers Branch police officer, complied despite having never before performed hypnosis, Flores told the Supreme Court.
Before the hypnosis session, Barganier told police both men entering Black’s house were white and had long hair. According to the petition, Flores, a Hispanic man, had short hair at the time of the crime.
In addition, Barganier did not identify Flores in a photo lineup. It was only when Barganier took the witness stand that she identified Flores as one of the two suspects.
A law passed by the Texas Legislature in 2023 said evidence gathered through “investigative hypnosis performed by a law enforcement agency” was inadmissible in court.
In 2016, the Court of Criminal Appeals granted Flores a stay of execution due to questions raised about Barganier’s hypnosis, but the attempt to overturn the conviction based on the junk science law was ultimately unsuccessful.
Flores’ lawyer, Gretchen Sween, said his conviction “rests on the kind of testimony that is now barred from use in Texas courtrooms.”
“The new science around memory tells us that the initial tests of an eyewitness’s memory are the only reliable ones — not the tainted testimony of a witness who has been hypnotized and makes an identification 13 months after a crime has occurred in this case,” Sween said in a statement.
“For too long, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has imposed arbitrary, unexplained barriers, denying death-sentenced prisoners with credible innocence claims, like Charles Flores, a chance to even get inside a courthouse to present their evidence of innocence before being executed,” she said.
Sween said she will continue to “pursue every available means to prove Mr. Flores’s innocence.”
“All he wants is a fair trial untainted by patently unreliable testimony and official misconduct,” she said.
Source: Ellie Ashby,
Photo Credit: The Supreme Court building in Washington D.C., on Jan. 22, 2023. Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
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