Supreme Court DENIES Last-Minute Death Row Plea!

The Supreme Court building featuring marble columns and a clear blue sky

A Texas man sits on death row today because a police officer with zero hypnosis training put a witness under, and the only court that could have stopped it just looked the other way.

Story Snapshot

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Charles Flores’ appeal on June 15, 2026, even though the prosecutors on his case filed a motion supporting his right to be heard.
The sole eyewitness failed to identify Flores in two photo lineups before a hypnosis session changed her memory and her story.
No physical evidence — no DNA, no fingerprints, no ballistics — ever linked Flores to the crime scene.
Texas banned hypnosis testimony in court in 2023, partly inspired by this case, but the law does not apply retroactively to Flores.

The Only Witness Could Not Pick Him Out — Until She Was Hypnotized

On the night of the 1998 murder of Betty Black in Farmers Branch, Texas, the key eyewitness, Jill Bargainer, described the suspect’s passenger as a tall white man with long hair. Charles Flores is Hispanic, short, and stocky, and at the time had a shaved head. Bargainer failed to identify Flores in not one but two separate photo lineups. Then a police officer — one with no hypnosis training — conducted a session with her. After that session, she identified Flores. That identification became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case against him. ^[4]

Forensic psychologists who reviewed the case did not mince words. Dr. Steven Lynn and memory researcher John Wixted called Bargainer’s post-hypnosis identification “astounding” given that she had already rejected Flores twice in lineups. Their concern is backed by decades of science. Since 1980, most U.S. appellate courts have either banned hypnotically refreshed testimony outright or placed strict conditions on its use, because the research consistently shows hypnosis inflates a witness’s confidence without improving accuracy. ^[7]

The Man Who Pulled the Trigger Went Home in 2016

Richard Childs admitted he was the shooter. He pleaded guilty, served 17 years, and walked out of prison in 2016. Flores, convicted under Texas’ “law of parties” — which holds a person responsible for a crime committed by someone else during a joint criminal act — never fired a weapon and was never placed at the scene by physical evidence. Childs is free. Flores is on death row. That contrast is not a legal technicality. It is the moral weight at the center of this case. ^[3]

Zero physical evidence connected Flores to the crime. No fingerprints. No DNA. No fibers, no footprints, no ballistics. The entire case rested on one witness whose memory was altered by an untrained officer using a technique that courts across the country had already begun rejecting as unreliable. ^[4]

Even the Prosecutors Agreed He Deserved a Hearing

Here is the detail that should stop you cold. The prosecutors on Flores’ case filed a motion supporting his right to have his appeal heard. That almost never happens. When the people whose job it is to keep a conviction intact say the court should take a second look, that is not a small thing. The Supreme Court denied the petition anyway, without comment, on June 15, 2026. ^[1]

Charles 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. The Supreme Court denied the petition without comment.https://t.co/AYB7bsIKyd

— myparistexas.com (@myparistexas1) June 16, 2026

Magicians Penn and Teller filed an amicus brief — a formal friend-of-the-court argument — on March 12, 2024, calling investigative hypnosis “junk science” that manipulates memory rather than recovers it. The Innocence Project filed briefs as well. Texas passed Senate Bill 338 in 2023, banning hypnosis testimony in criminal trials going forward, a reform that advocates say was driven in part by the Flores case. But the law is not retroactive. It cannot reach back to 1999. ^[1] ^[4]

The Science Has Moved On. The Courts Have Not.

Research published as far back as 1985 by forensic psychologist Martin T. Orne concluded that hypnosis does not improve the accuracy of memory — it improves the confidence of the person remembering, which is a dangerous combination in a courtroom. A hypnotized witness does not recall better. They just believe their recall more strongly. Juries, in turn, believe confident witnesses. The result is a chain of manufactured certainty built on a foundation that scientists have rejected for forty years. ^[18]

A federal appeals court tossed an Indiana conviction in 2019 under nearly identical circumstances — one witness, failed pre-hypnosis lineups, a positive identification only after hypnosis. The parallels to the Flores case are striking. The difference is that in Indiana, the court acted. In Texas, Flores has been denied relief through at least four rounds of appeals, with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals repeatedly dismissing his petitions without even reviewing the merits of the hypnosis evidence. ^[1] ^[3]

What Happens When the System Runs Out of Moves

The Supreme Court’s silence is not a verdict on Flores’ guilt or innocence. It is a procedural door closing. Courts are built to protect finality — once a conviction is locked in, the bar to reopen it is extraordinarily high, even when the science that put someone away has been discredited. That is a feature of the system, not a bug. But it is a feature that demands the system get it right the first time. In this case, the facts on record suggest it did not. A man may die because a witness who could not identify him twice was put in a chair, told to relax, and came out certain. That should trouble anyone who believes justice means something.