In a case fraught with all the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction, Charles has maintained his innocence and been denied a new trial.

Charles Don Flores of Irving, Texas was convicted and sentenced to death in Dallas County in April 1999 for the January 29, 1998, shooting death and attempted robbery of Betty Black, which occurred in her home in Farmers Branch, Texas. Farmers Branch and Irving are communities within the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

Flores has consistently maintained his innocence. No physical evidence has ever linked him to the crime scene—no DNA, fingerprints, or ballistics. He remains on death row, out of mandatory appeals.

We know Charles is innocent because:

• Charles never matched the description of the perpetrator. Jill Barganier, the only eyewitness to identify him--for the first time, during his trial--had initially described seeing “two white males” with “long, dirty hair” who looked “similar.” She was unable to identify Flores in any of the photo lineups presented to her at the time of the crime—likely because he was not a white male with long hair, but a large Hispanic male with short, shaved hair.

• Charles was first suggested as a suspect by police, and not by either of the two people indisputably involved in the crime (Richard Childs and his girlfriend/drug connection Jackie Roberts, mother of the Blacks' grandchildren with knowledge of their routines). Instead, members of the Farmers Branch narcotics unit, who had been working with Childs, directed Childs to put Charles at the crime scene during a partially recorded custodial interview.

• The State used “forensic hypnosis” to influence the memory of the eyewitness. After a suggestive hypnosis session conducted by a police officer involved in the investigation, Mrs. Bargainer later said she was “more than 100% certain” she had seen Flores the morning of the crime. This identification of him occurred 13 months after the crime, in the middle of Flores’s trial in the courtroom when he, the only Hispanic in the courtroom, was seated at the defense table. This so-called “identification,” made in the middle of trial, was the State’s only evidence placing Flores at the crime scene. The use of testimony obtained following “forensic hypnosis“ has, as of September 2023, been banned in Texas.

• The real killer walks free today. After Charles was sent to death row, Richard Childs, a white man and son of a local police officer, pled guilty to the murder of Betty Black as part of a secretly negotiated plea bargain that resulted in a light sentence. He was paroled in 2016 after serving less than half of his sentence.

• Charles has an alibi. He was at home asleep with his girlfriend when the crime occurred. The prosecutors attempted to indict his alibi witness to intimidate her and prevent her from testifying. The prosecution also indicted or attempted to indict other witnesses favorable to the defense including his elderly parents.

• The State made undisclosed deals with numerous witnesses, despite denying this at trial. Attorneys discovered years later that many of the State’s witnesses were given substantial leniency in exchange for testifying against Flores or, in the case of co-defendant Childs, for keeping his mouth shut.

• The man who spearheaded the racist trial is still pushing for an execution today. Trial prosecutor Jason January left the Dallas County DA’s office in 2000. The Flores trial was not the first time he had promoted the use of “forensic hypnosis“ to obtain a conviction. Years after working to send Charles to death row, he continued to defend the practice, writing a letter to a Texas state senator arguing against a proposed ban on hypnotically induced testimony and specifically defending it as a tool that had helped secure Flores’s conviction. Yet, during trial, to convince the judge to allow her to testify, January had told the court that hypnosis had played no role in Mrs. Bargainer’s belated identification. Significant claims of prosecutorial and police misconduct in the underlying trial have never been heard by any court.

CHARLES’S CASE IS PART OF A LARGER PATTERN OF INJUSTICE:

With 67 documented exonerations, Dallas County is among the five counties with the most exonerations (and thus the most wrongful convictions). A number of these exonerations have resulted from the work of Conviction Integrity Units (CIU). The first CIU in the country was created in Dallas in 2007 under the leadership of then-District Attorney Craig Watkins. Many of the wrongful convictions that led to exonerations involved flawed eyewitness identification testimony and prosecutorial misconduct, both of which are evident in the Flores case.