Death row inmate appeals murder conviction after hypnotized witness provided testimony
Niamh Shackleton
Featured Image Credit: NBC News
A man who has been on death row for over two decades is fighting his case once more after maintaining his innocence since his 1999 conviction.
In January 1998, 64-year-old Betty Black was murdered in her home during an attempted robbery in Farmer's Branch, Texas.
Richard Childs pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 35 years behind bars. He's since become a free man after being released on parole in 2016.
The same can't be said about his co-defendant Charles Flores. He was handed the death penalty in 1999 and has been on death row ever since.
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One of the witnesses that helped convict Flores was Black's neighbor, Jill Barganier. During his trial she said that she was 100 percent sure that she'd seen Flores enter Black's home on the day of her murder.
Barganier testimony is said to have played a key part in Flores' fate as there was no physical evidence to tie him to the crime.
Flores has attempted to appeal his conviction four times, Slate reported. Now he has filed a petition to the Supreme Court.
Flores, who has always denied any involvement in Black's death, has argued that Barganier's testimony was helped with 'investigative hypnosis'. Supposedly this technique helps 'obtain vital information that may have been forgotten'.
Any testimony given under investigative hypnosis should be 'verified with supporting physical or testimonial evidence', the Department of Justice said back in 1979, adding that 'investigative conclusion should not be based solely on hypnotically obtained information'.
But before she was hypnotised, Barganier had said that she had seen two white men with long hair and similar builds got out of a car by Black's home. Meanwhile, Flores is Hispanic and had short hair at the time.
She went on to help a police artist do a sketch of whom she said she had seen going into the home, and the person (again) looked nothing like Flores.
Since Flores' conviction, the state of Texas passed a law in 2023 stating that a statement made during or after investigative hypnosis 'is not admissible against a defendant in a criminal trial, whether offered in the guilt or innocence phase or the punishment phase of the trial, if the hypnotic session giving rise to the statement was performed by a law enforcement agency to investigate the offense that is the subject of the trial'.
Despite this and Flores' ongoing appeals, law enforcement maintains that there was more to the case that just Barganier's testimony.
A former narcotics sergeant at the time of Black's murder told NBC News: "There's more facts to this case than just a hypnotism."