How this headline may connect to industries in Texas. Technical scores are below — click any ? for what a metric means.
Supreme Court rejects death row appeal backed by Penn & Teller
TexasGDELTGDELT event25% biasedMon, Jun 15, 2026, 12:00 AM
4 of 16 sentences classified as biased · Model: roberta-anno-lexical-ft-v1
Supreme Court rejects death row appeal backed by Penn & Teller WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on June 15 rejected an appeal from a Texas death row inmate whose case had gotten the attention of magicians Penn & Teller.Lawyers for Charles Flores, who was found guilty of shooting a suburban Dallas woman in 1998 during an attempted robbery of her home, had argued his trial was "irreparably tainted by junk science and official misconduct." Police used "investigative hypnosis" on a key witness who testified that she saw Flores go into the woman’s house.Penn & Teller filed a brief supporting Flores, telling the Supreme Court that, as master manipulators of perception, they have an obligation to "expose flim-flam when they see it." "Penn & Teller acknowledge that they are experts in magic, not law," their lawyer wrote."But they believe there is something fundamentally amiss in the justice system if flim-flam like investigative hypnosis can be used by law enforcement to reconfigure the gap-laden memory of a key witness in a capital prosecution." A neighbor of the murdered woman initially described seeing two White men with long hair go into the victim’s home.She failed to pick Flores – a Hispanic man who had short, shaved hair – out of a photo lineup.And the composite computer drawing she produced did not resemble him.Flores’ lawyers argued that the witness was then primed to change her memory through a hypnosis session that included such questions as whether the hair of the man she saw was short, shaved and neatly cut."Does he have it neatly cut or is it trimmed," the witness was asked of the man she had said had long, dirty hair.Near the end of the session, the officer told the witness she would "be able to recall more of these events as time goes on." At the trial 13 months later, after Flores' photograph had appeared in news stories, the witness testified that she was "100%" sure she saw Flores go into the house.Prosecutors argued Flores has had multiple chances to challenge his conviction.More: Supreme Court blocks Alabama nitrogen gas execution of double murderer Two weeks before Flores was scheduled to be executed in 2016, he was given a chance to raise new concerns about the witnesses’ identification of him.After an evidentiary hearing, Flores was denied a new trial.The Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from Flores in 2021 and again in 2022.Prosecutors told the Supreme Court that Flores’ latest appeal "essentially repackaged and reasserted the same claims." Flores’ attorneys countered that he’s raising new information, including a "new consensus in the scientific study of eyewitness memory." Although Texas passed a law in 2013 to help people show that since-discredited science contributed to their wrongful convictions, the state’s highest criminal court has ruled against every death-sentence prisoner who has invoked that law, they pointed out."There is a Texas-sized due process problem burdening death-sentenced individuals like Flores with credible claims of innocence," his attorneys wrote to the court.This article originally appeared on USA TODAY Own: Supreme Court rejects death row appeal backed by Penn & Teller