Supreme Court Rejects Texas Death-Row Appeal on Hypnosis Claim

The Supreme Court on June 15 rejected an appeal from Texas death-row inmate Charles Flores. Flores was convicted of shooting a suburban Dallas woman in 1998 during an attempted home robbery. Lawyers for Flores argued the trial was irreparably tainted by investigative hypnosis performed on a neighbor who testified she saw him enter the victim’s house.

The neighbor initially described two White men with long hair and failed to pick Flores, a Hispanic man with short, shaved hair, out of a photo lineup. The composite drawing she produced also did not resemble him. During the hypnosis session, the witness was asked whether the man’s hair was short, shaved, and neatly cut.

Thirteen months later, after Flores’ photograph had appeared in news stories, the witness testified she was “100%” sure she saw Flores enter the house. Flores had raised concerns about the identification two weeks before his scheduled 2016 execution. After an evidentiary hearing he was denied a new trial.

The Supreme Court declined to hear his appeals in 2021 and again in 2022. ” They also noted that Texas passed a 2013 law to help people show that since-discredited science contributed to wrongful convictions, yet the state’s highest criminal court has ruled against every death-sentence prisoner who has invoked that law. Penn & Teller filed a brief supporting Flores.