Penn and Teller challenge Texas death sentence based on hypnotized witness testimony

A Supreme Court brief signed by Penn and Teller put an unusual spotlight on a Texas death sentence by arguing that investigative hypnosis can turn uncertainty into testimony that looks reliable to a jury. At the center is Charles Don Flores, who has spent more than 25 years on death row for a 1998 murder in Farmers Branch, Texas.

Flores’s conviction rested on a single identification: a neighbor who had not picked him out of an early photo array and identified him for the first time at trial after police hypnosis. Flores’s supporters say that sequence matters because the witness’s memory was not recovered, but shaped. They argue the hypnosis session created the only identification ever used against him in a case where the stakes were death.

The petition for certiorari, Charles Don Flores v. Texas, No. 25-6774, was docketed by the Supreme Court of the United States on December 29, 2025, and filed in February 2026. Penn and Teller joined a broader coalition of amici that included the American Psychological Association, Jennifer Thompson, Texas Defender Service, and exoneree Christopher Scott. In their brief, the magicians said the same kinds of cognitive manipulation used in stage performance were present in the police hypnosis session, and that investigative hypnosis relies on perception tricks rather than a trustworthy reconstruction of memory.

Texas Defender Service has framed the dispute as a broader test of whether Texas courts have refused to apply state law meant to stop wrongful executions. Texas enacted Article 11.073 in 2011, the so-called junk science writ, to let courts revisit convictions when scientific understanding changes. Flores’s supporters say the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has repeatedly declined to give full consideration to the new science, using procedural barriers that keep the evidence from being meaningfully reviewed, especially in death cases.

The fight over Flores’s case reached Dallas County as his lawyers asked a court not to set an execution date while they pursued the hypnosis claim, after the Texas Attorney General’s Office sought one. The larger question now before the justices is whether a death sentence can stand when the key identification came from a method many scientists and legal advocates now regard as unreliable, a ruling that could reverberate far beyond one case in Texas.