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Correction, 6/16/2026: An earlier version of this article stated that Richard Childs testified in Charles Don Flores’ 1999 murder trial, however, Childs did not testify in that trial. The story has been corrected.
Even with recent a pair of state laws that could possibly aid to his case, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition for review of a man on death row for a Farmers Branch murder on Monday.
In 1999, Charles Don Flores was convicted for the 1998 murder of 64-year-old Elizabeth Black during a burglary he and an accomplice carried out at Black’s home. His advocates say that it was eyewitness testimony brought about by investigative hypnosis conducted by police that played too large of a role in his conviction.
Originally, prosecutors accused Flores of being the triggerman who committed Black’s murder, however, that thinking seemed to change. Richard Childs later admitted to being the shooter as a part of a plea agreement that earned him a 35 years sentence for murder, reduced from capital murder, that could’ve ended with a death sentence. Flores’ representatives have said Childs’ confession was incentivized by the reduced sentence plea deal.
Flores has maintained his innocence from the beginning, asserting that he was not present at the scene or involved in any other way. In more recent years, he has been vocal about how scientific knowledge regarding investigative hypnosis has been divulged, discrediting, he says, the testimony of the key prosecution witness, something he says he would not have been convicted without.
Jill Barganier, Black’s neighbor who provided eyewitness testimony against Flores, initially claimed that she saw white men with shoulder-length hair enter Black’s house. At the time of the murder, Flores, who is Hispanic, had short, dark hair. Even after the hypnosis interview, Baragainer was unable to identify Flores as the suspect from a police lineup. It was a year later, in court, when the witness identified Flores as one of the people she saw enter Black’s house on the day of the murder.
In Flores’ appeal, he said that his conviction should be overturned thanks to Texas’ “junk science law,” which went into effect in 2013. The law allows a convicted person to seek relief if they feel relevant scientific evidence was not available during their trial, or if there is new scientific evidence that contradicts the evidence used by the state at trial. Additionally, in 2023 Texas outlawed the use of investigative hypnosis in criminal trials, putting hypnosis squarely in the junk science category, however the law is not retroactive and can not apply to Flores’ case.
The state never presented any physical evidence against Flores, and even though Baragainer it took Bargainer a long time to identify Flores, she did describe a unique, multicolor Volkswagen Bug, similar to the one Childs owned at the time, as the vehicle the suspects got out of. The distinctive design of the vehicle reportedly stood out to other witnesses as well.
During the trial, the prosecution also homed in on Flores’s alleged behavior after they say he learned that police were looking for that colorful car, which Childs had abandoned behind Flores’s trailer. At the time, Flores admitted to burning the vehicle and running to Mexico before later being arrested after a high-speed chase through a residential neighborhood.
The Supreme Court rejected Flores’ request to order the state court to review his appeal by simply noting on the docket “petition denied.” The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had declined to review Flores’ junk science claims in 2020 and again in 2025 when Flores sought a new trial so that new evidence could be presented, but the court ruled he failed to meet the law’s threshold for new evidence.
In a statement to the Texas Tribune on Monday, Flores’ lawyer, Gretchen Sween said that they will continue to pursue all available legal options following the Supreme Court’s denial. She also took aim at the state court that has ruled against her client, saying it has “imposed arbitrary, unexplained barriers, denying death-sentenced prisoners with credible innocence claims.” The attorney also doubled down on the dubious nature of witness testimony derived from investigative hypnosis.
“His conviction rests on the kind of testimony that is now barred from use in Texas courtroom,’ Sween said. “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.”
