PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "At Flores' hearing late last year in Dallas, Sween called Flores' expert, Steven Lynn, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He explained that in the past 15 years, a shift has occurred in the psychological community, which believes hypnosis is not safe to use on lost memory retrieval in any way and the findings in the Zani case were erroneous, meriting a new trial for Flores."
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STORY: "Death Row Case in Dallas County Puts Hypnosis on Trial as "Junk Science," by Brian Maschino, published by The Dallas Observer onMarch 29, 2018. (Christian McPhate is an award-winning journalist who specializes in investigative reporting. He covers crime, the environment, business, government and social justice. His work has appeared in several publications, including the Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, the Miami Herald, San Antonio Express News and The Washington Times.)
GIST: "Charles Flores and Richard Childs broke into a house on
Bergen Street in Farmers Branch and killed Elizabeth Black while
searching for money. Meth
is why they wanted the cash. They scored a half-pound of it a few hours
earlier and took it back to Flores' trailer, where he weighed it and
found Childs' drug dealer had shorted him. Flores pointed a handgun at
Roberts, purportedly as a joke, and persuaded her “to call the drug
dealer to try to rectify the situation,” but dealers are not known for
rectifying situations. So Roberts told Flores about the $39,000 in cash
stashed behind a medicine cabinet at her mother-in-law's house in
Farmers Branch. Her ex had left it there and told his mother, Elizabeth,
to give Roberts $500 a month in spousal support while he served 15
years in prison on a drug charge. They
were searching for money and planning to shoot the guard dog, Santana,
but didn't realize Elizabeth Black would be home, too. Each man had
placed a potato on the end of his gun — a .380 and .44 Magnum — to act
as a poor-man's silencer. When Bill Black came home from work later that
morning, he discovered potato fragments splattered on the walls and
ceiling and his 64-year old wife, Elizabeth, and Santana dead. The
$39,000 was still hidden in the master bedroom closet. The medicine
cabinet had been torn off the wall. Law enforcement recovered the
.44 Magnum, believed to have been used to kill the dog, from Childs'
home after his arrest on the night of Elizabeth Black's murder. Flores
was captured a few months later in Dallas. The murder weapon was never
recovered. Childs
took a plea deal and served 17 years of a 35-year prison sentence
before being paroled. Flores, who went to trial before Childs' deal, was
convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Witnesses against him
included a friend and Flores' father-in-law, who claimed Flores told
them he was there at the murder; Childs' former girlfriend, who smoked
dope with them moments before the murder; and an eyewitness who had
undergone forensic hypnosis shortly after the murder. Although Childs
said he was the one who killed Elizabeth Black when he signed the deal,
Flores was culpable for the murder since he took part in the crime. Forensic hypnosis is what brought Flores, who is now 47, back to a
Dallas district courtroom in October and again in December. Texas was
supposed to execute him in June 2016, but the Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals delayed the lethal injection a week before it was scheduled.
Flores' new attorneys filed a motion that argued, in part, that he
deserved a new trial because forensic hypnosis “was based on junk
science.” Law enforcement officials, however, claim that forensic
hypnosis is one of several tools that has helped generate leads in
some high-profile cold cases..................Today, the Texas Rangers use forensic hypnosis
more than any other law enforcement agency in the state because they're
less likely to know specific details of a local investigation when
they're called in for help, says Perry Gilmore of the Texas Association
for Investigative Hypnosis and the Texas Crime Stoppers Council, which
advises the governor on crime stoppers programs around the state. He is
trained in forensic hypnosis. “We always say it is not a shortcut
for a good traditional investigations,” he says. “When we do get
information from hypnosis, we try to verify as many of those facts as we
can................Flores watched Sween "dismantle" the Dallas county prosecutor's case
during closing arguments of his hearing in late 2017. He called her a
“superhero” on his blog, “Innocent on Death Row.” Sween used a
PowerPoint presentation projected on three screens in the courtroom to
give a lesson on the history of the criminal appellate law and statute
related to forensic hypnosis. She discussed a recent change in Texas law
that allows defense attorneys to challenge hypnosis as “junk science.”......... At Flores' hearing late last year in Dallas, Sween called Flores'
expert, Steven Lynn, a professor of psychology at the State University
of New York at Binghamton. He explained that in the past 15 years, a
shift has occurred in the psychological community, which believes
hypnosis is not safe to use on lost memory retrieval in any way and the
findings in the Zani case were erroneous, meriting a new trial for
Flores. The prosecution claimed that Lynn wasn't pointing out
anything new and the substance of his opinion was available in Flores'
original trial in the late '90s. "The court finds that, through
reasonable diligence, [Flores] could have obtained the testimony of Dr.
Lynn or a similar expert at the time of his trial," wrote Dallas County
Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Ott. In court documents,
Sween introduces testimony from hypnosis and memory expert Martin Orne,
one of the world's foremost forensic psychologists and someone whom
courts have used to determine if forensic hypnosis should be submitted
as evidence. “Dr. Orne no longer believes that procedural
safeguards reduce the risk associated with hypnotically enhanced
memory,” she wrote. “There is a consensus among scientists in the field
of memory and eyewitness identification that hypnosis is an inherently
suggestive pretrial procedure based on data that supports that
perspective.” The prosecution introduced its expert witness, Dr.
David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University whose
knowledge of hypnosis spans 45 years. He is also part of the American
Medical Association's Council on Scientific Affairs panel that evaluated
the effects of hypnosis on memory. "It suggested that there can
be complications with hypnotically refreshed memory, not unlike the
things that are in the Zani hearing," Spiegel testified. "And it
suggested that caution should be used when hypnosis is used in the
forensic setting. Sometimes false information or confabulation can
occur. So it should be used with caution." Spiegel testified
that although new scientific studies on hypnosis and memory have been
conducted, their findings have been consistent with what was already
known before Flores' original trial. “There
is a consensus among scientists in the field of memory and eyewitness
identification that hypnosis is an inherently suggestive pretrial
procedure." Sween also argues that the state did not present
any physical evidence and rested its case on the testimonies of drug
dealers and users, some of whom were seeking leniency in their own
cases. The only “seemingly untainted evidence the state presented to
place Flores on the scene was Bargainer's hypnotically altered
testimony,” she said. Prosecutors, however, claim hypnotically
refreshed testimony is still admissible in Texas courts as long as it
meets the Zani factors. In Barganier's case, when she arrived at Flores'
trial in the late '90s and recognized Flores as the passenger, the
court conducted a hearing and determined that her testimony was
admissible. Psychologist George Mount, an expert for the
prosecution, testified during Flores' original trial that he'd evaluated
hundreds of hypnosis sessions, taught hypnosis for 20 years and served
on the board that developed the exam for Texas Commission on Law
Enforcement Officers Standards and saw no evidence of any incorrect
procedures on the video recording of Barganier's forensic hypnosis
session. Jason January, the lead prosecutor in Flores' original
trial, summarized the corroborating evidence placing Flores at the scene
as follows: Eight people witnessed Childs and Flores together shortly
before Black's murder, two people claimed Flores admitted being present
at the scene and one person saw Flores torching Childs' Volkswagen on
Interstate 30 two days after Black's murder. Flores' case is now in the hands 195th District Judge Hector Garza, who will rule sometime in the coming months."
The entire story can be read at:
http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/texas-court-reconsiders-use-of-hypnosis-induced-testimony-in-dallas-county-death-row-case-10501228The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
