The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review the case of a Texas death row prisoner who argued that his conviction rests on eyewitness testimony influenced by investigative hypnosis, a practice the state has since barred in criminal cases.

Charles Flores was sentenced to death for the 1998 killing of Betty Black in Farmers Branch, Texas, near Dallas. The prosecutor's star witness, Jill Barganier, who lived next door to Black, twice failed to pick Flores, a Latino man with short, shaved hair, as the suspect in police photo arrays.

Barganier instead identified Richard Lynn Childs, a white man with long, wavy hair, as the man she saw exiting a Volkswagen Beetle and approaching Black's front door in the moments preceding her shooting death. She made one of those identifications while being interviewed under hypnosis inside a police station a few days after the killing by an officer who had never attempted the practice before.

During the hypnosis session, the officer asked questions that Flores' attorneys claimed were meant to plant in Barganier's memory the image of a man who matched Flores' appearance.

"Is his hair short? Is it shaved? Is it neatly cut?" the officer asked, prompting a negative response from Barganier. The officer then told her she might be "able to recall other things as time goes along."

Flores was charged as an accomplice, and Barganier ultimately identified him at trial 13 months after the crime, saying in court she was "100%" sure he was one of the killers. He was convicted in 1999. In 2000, Childs admitted to killing Black and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Childs was later released on parole in 2016.

Peaking in its use between the 1950s and 1970s, hypnosis has long been abandoned as an investigative tool for criminal prosecution. In recent decades, scientific understanding of memory has shifted toward viewing it as an active and reconstructive process, rather than a passive recorder of information that hypnosis can reliably retrieve.

Texas banned the in-court use of statements obtained during or after hypnosis in 2023, but the change in the law was not made retroactive and therefore didn't apply to Flores.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, or TCCA, the state's top criminal court, shut down three separate attempts by Flores' attorneys to challenge his conviction under Texas' junk science statute, a 2013 law codified as Article 11.073, which permits prisoners to challenge convictions based on relevant scientific evidence that was previously unavailable, has changed, or has since been discredited.

In a petition for certiorari filed on Feb. 6, Flores' attorney, Gretchen Sween, told the justices that the TCCA violated his due process rights under federal law by rejecting his innocence claims without providing a meaningful reason.

Sween urged the Supreme Court to intervene by clarifying how Texas courts should evaluate investigative hypnosis in light of modern scientific understanding of memory and eyewitness identification.

Supporters of Flores' innocence bid included famed magicians Penn & Teller, who said in an amicus brief in March that the type of hypnosis used in Flores' case relied on the same memory-manipulation techniques they use to persuade audience members that events occurred when, in fact, they did not.

But on Monday, the justices took a pass on Flores' case. There were no dissenting opinions.

Sween said in a statement to reporters that Flores' legal team will pursue "every available means" to prove his innocence, chiding the TCCA for imposing what she described as "arbitrary, unexplained barriers."

"All he wants is a fair trial untainted by patently unreliable testimony and official misconduct," she 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 as occurred in this case."

More than three dozen criminal defendants who have been exonerated since 1989 were convicted in prosecutions involving witnesses under hypnosis, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

--Editing by Marygrace Anderson.