Charles Don Flores v. Texas

Charles Don Flores was convicted and sentenced to death for the shooting death of Betty Black based on a mid-trial identification made by a witness who had been subjected to “investigative hypnosis” by police officers involved in the underlying investigation. This witness initially described perpetrators who looked nothing like Flores. Soon after the crime, the witness failed to pick a recent picture of him out of a photo lineup under circumstances that the current consensus in eyewitness-memory science views as highly probative of innocence. The brazen manipulation of a key witness was just one component of a host of longconcealed misconduct by state actors, designed to push responsibility for a crime perpetrated by the son of a local police officer, heavily involved in narcotics, onto Flores, an unconnected druguser living in a trailer. After Flores’s conviction, the police officer’s son confessed to being the shooter, obtained a secretly negotiated plea deal, served a fraction of his sentence, and was paroled the same year Flores was scheduled to be executed. Flores has always maintained his innocence. Well after his ineffectual initial appeals were exhausted, Flores obtained counsel who began unearthing copious evidence supporting claims for habeas relief under both federal constitutional and state law—of junk science, false testimony, official misconduct, and, most critically, actual innocence. To get back into court, he relied on state-created procedural vehicles expressly designed to permit development of the factual basis for such claims. See Tex. Code of Crim. Proc., art. 11.071 § 5(a)(2) & art. 11.073. Yet Texas’s highest criminal court, the sole arbiter of post-conviction relief in death-penalty cases, has dismissed those claims without considering the merits, an act that cannot be squared with the state law cited. The unexplained, boilerplate invocation of a state procedural rule in a case of profound significance gives rise to the following Question Presented: Where a state has created liberty interests that give death-sentenced prisoners with credible claims of innocence vehicles for proving their innocence in subsequent habeas proceedings, is the federal right to due process violated when the putatively innocent is arbitrarily denied permission to exercise the right to prove his innocence?