Penn & Teller on Hypnosis
- Fred Litwin
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
Penn Jillette, the talkative member of the magic act Penn & Teller, knows that people will find the duo’s new project a little surprising. It is a Supreme Court brief filed last month urging the justices to hear an appeal from Charles Don Flores, a death row inmate in Texas.
A key piece of evidence in the case was tainted by a police officer’s “investigative hypnosis” of a witness, the brief said.
Here is a summary of the case:
The brief noted that there was no physical evidence against Flores. The witness who identified him at trial, Jill Barganier, had initially described someone who looked nothing like him. That changed after she underwent hypnosis.
Barganier at first told police that she had seen two white men with long hair who resembled one another pull up in a Volkswagen bug in the driveway of her neighbor, Elizabeth Black, shortly before Black was murdered.
Barganier identified one of them, Richard Childs, from a photo array. He was a white man with long hair and a lanky frame. He pleaded guilty to the murder, served about 18 years and was paroled in 2016.
The police were also interested in Flores. But he was a large Hispanic man with short hair.
A few days after the murder, Barganier met with a police officer, telling him again that the men she had seen both had long hair.
The officer, who had never hypnotized anyone before, told Barganier that he would help her summon a memory by pressing a play button on a mental “recorder” that would allow her to see “a film of the events that occurred on that day.”
During the hypnosis session, the officer asked suggestive questions.
“Is his hair short? Is it shaved? Is it neatly cut?” he asked of the driver. “Does he have it neatly cut or is it trimmed?” he asked of the passenger. Presented with a photo array of six Hispanic men, Barganier did not identify Flores.
But at the trial 13 months later, she said Flores was one of the men she had seen on the morning of the killing. She was, she said, “over 100 percent” sure.
The trial judge was not convinced, noting that Barganier by now knew Flores’s name. “Honestly, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to pick out who is the Hispanic individual in the courtroom,” the judge said.
But the judge allowed Barganier’s testimony. Flores was convicted and sentenced to die.
I posted this because of Jim Garrison's use of hypnosis in his investigation. He had Perry Russo hypnotized three times and he was fed leading questions which managed to construct a false memory [along with the use of sodium pentothal.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Hypnosis
Links to transcripts of Russo's hypnosis sessions and link to an actual recording of his 3rd session.
Under hypnosis, Perry Russo remembered that Lefty Peterson and Sandra Moffett were also at the party with Ferrie, Bertrand and Oswald. The only problem is that both Peterson and Moffett denied being there.
Garrison tried to mislead the HSCA by mislabeling the transcripts of Perry Russo's hypnosis sessions to hide the fact that he was asked leading questions.