If You Got the Call on June 15, 2026, This Page Is for You
If your phone rang on June 15, 2026, and the caller was your brother’s habeas attorney, and the words were “the Supreme Court denied cert,” you already know what this page is about. You are not reading it to learn what happened. You lived it. You are reading because you need to know what still comes next — and you need to know it from a lawyer who will tell you the truth about the road ahead instead of selling you hope.
This page is about Charles Flores. It is about the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, about Article 11.073 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, about the 88th Texas Legislature’s 2023 ban on law-enforcement hypnosis, and about the United States Supreme Court’s decision not to hear his case. But more importantly, this page is about you — about the Texas family watching someone they love sit on death row with a conviction built on evidence that the Texas Legislature itself has now declared unreliable.
We are Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña, of Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are not habeas attorneys. We do not file post-conviction writs in criminal court, and we will not pretend otherwise. But we have spent more than two decades standing between Texans and the systems that failed them — and when a wrongful conviction ends, when the writ finally succeeds or the pardon finally comes, the fight for the civil recovery begins. That is the work we do. This page explains how that work fits into the moment your family is living right now.
“Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.” Every verdict, every settlement, every recovery we discuss on this page belongs to the facts of a specific case. Your case will be its own case. What we offer is not a promise of any particular result — it is the same thing we have offered Texas families for 27 years: a real trial team, with the federal-court reach and the insider knowledge to take on the institutions that broke your family.
What Happened in Flores v. State — The Facts That Matter
On the morning of February 8, 1999, a 64-year-old woman named Elizabeth “Betty” Black was murdered in her home in Dallas County. She was a real person. She had a family. Whatever this page says about the legal machinery that has run for more than a quarter century since her death must begin with the truth that her loss cannot be undone by any courtroom, and no procedural outcome will ever return her to the people who loved her.
Charles Flores was convicted of that murder later in 1999 and sentenced to death. The case against him rested heavily on the in-court identification of him by a neighbor-witness named Jill Barganier. There are facts about that identification that the trial jury never heard in the form we now know them, and that the Texas Legislature has since declared legally insufficient.
Before any hypnosis took place, Barganier told Farmers Branch police that two men had entered Betty Black’s home that morning. She described both of them as white men with long hair. Charles Flores is Hispanic and had short hair. She was then shown a pre-trial photo lineup — and she failed to identify him. Thirteen months after the crime, in court, she identified him for the first time. That identification became the spine of the State’s case.
Between her original description and her in-court identification, the Farmers Branch Police Department did something that Texas has now, by statute, declared inadmissible: a police officer named Alfredo Roen Serna, who had no documented training or prior experience in forensic hypnosis, hypnotized the witness in an attempt to refresh her recollection. Whatever memory emerged from that session is the memory the jury ultimately heard.
For 27 years, that conviction has stood. On June 15, 2026, the United States Supreme Court denied certiorari without comment, leaving in place the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ rejection of Flores’s junk-science writ on procedural grounds — a holding the defense has called the imposition of “arbitrary, unexplained barriers.” Defense counsel Gretchen Sween has publicly stated that every available avenue will continue to be pursued. The legal road is not over. The constitutional questions are not answered. But the highest court in the land has declined to answer them now.
If you are the family, the June 15 call was not an ending. It was a turn.
The Texas Junk Science Law (Article 11.073 CCP) — What It Says, What It Requires
Article 11.073 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure is the “junk science” writ. The Texas Legislature enacted it in 2013 through House Bill 1849. It was designed to do something simple and important: allow a person convicted of a crime to challenge that conviction when later scientific advances show that the evidence used against them was unreliable in ways the original trial could not have known.
To win relief under Article 11.073, an applicant has to show two things. First, the scientific evidence the conviction rested on must be “previously unavailable” — meaning it was not ascertainable through the exercise of reasonable diligence at the time of trial. Second, the evidence must be “controlling on at least one claim of error.” The first of those two requirements is the choke point.
Here is the problem the Flores case exposes. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has read “previously unavailable” in a way that defense attorneys across the state have criticized as overly narrow. Even when the scientific basis for challenging evidence has crystallized — even when the federal government, the National Academy of Sciences, and now the Texas Legislature itself have all declared that forensic hypnosis is unreliable — the CCA has held that the applicant failed to show that the evidence was not “ascertainable” through “reasonable diligence” at the time of the original trial. In other words: even if the science was wrong in 1999, the law can hold that a 1999 defense lawyer should have known it was wrong. That is a hard standard to meet when the State’s own expert witnesses were presenting hypnosis-refreshed testimony as reliable.
The criticism is bipartisan and legal, not political. The CCA has been faulted for imposing “arbitrary, unexplained barriers” on junk-science claims. What Article 11.073 was designed to fix, the CCA’s interpretation of it has, in many cases, kept broken.
Why Forensic Hypnosis Is Now Considered Junk Science — The Record
The science on investigative hypnosis is not new, but it took decades to make its way into the law. The U.S. Department of Justice published its Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement in 1999, the same year Flores was tried. The DOJ guide warned against the use of forensic hypnosis because of its well-documented tendency to produce confabulation — the unconscious filling of memory gaps with invented detail that the witness then comes to believe is real.
In 1994, the Washington Supreme Court in State v. Henthorn held that hypnotically refreshed testimony was inadmissible because the procedure creates false memories. By the time of the 2014 report from the National Academy of Sciences, the consensus was unmistakable: forensic hypnosis is not a memory tool. It is a memory contamination tool. It produces source-monitoring errors — the witness can no longer tell the difference between what she actually saw and what the hypnotist’s questions caused her to imagine.
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, whose research underlies most modern eyewitness identification law, has documented for decades how suggestibility in any form — and especially the focused, guided suggestibility of a hypnotic session — reshapes the witness’s memory. The witness does not lie. The witness believes. That is exactly what makes the evidence so dangerous in a courtroom: it sounds credible because the witness is not trying to deceive anyone.
What the trial jury in 1999 heard as a refreshed recollection, modern science calls a constructed one. And the Texas Legislature has now agreed.
Texas’s 2023 Ban on Law-Enforcement Hypnosis — Article 38.22 § 6 CCP
In 2023, the 88th Texas Legislature passed House Bill 2705, which added Section 6 to Article 38.22 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. The new subsection declares law-enforcement-conducted investigative hypnosis evidence inadmissible in Texas criminal proceedings. The law reflects a legislative determination — made by the elected representatives of the State of Texas — that this kind of evidence is too unreliable to put before a jury.
The Texas Forensic Science Commission’s prior work on hypnosis had long raised the same concerns. The 2023 statute is the Legislature’s answer: hypnosis conducted by law enforcement, with the implicit and explicit suggestion of the State’s power behind it, cannot come into a Texas courtroom as evidence.
For Charles Flores, the ban came decades too late. The 2023 statute is not retroactive in the way that would undo his 1999 conviction. That is the tragedy of the timing — the State of Texas has now said, by statute, that the kind of evidence that convicted him is unreliable, but the procedural posture of his case means he cannot directly benefit from that determination.
What the 2023 ban does mean is this: any Texas criminal case going forward in which law-enforcement hypnosis is offered will be stopped at the courtroom door. And the ban strengthens — powerfully — the basis on which Flores and other similarly-situated prisoners can argue that the science was knowable, that the science has now been authoritatively rejected, and that the procedural barriers to revisiting their convictions should yield to the substantive truth.
What the SCOTUS Denial Means for Flores and Other Texas Death Row Inmates
The Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits. It is a decision not to review the lower court’s decision. That distinction matters procedurally — but it does not soften what it feels like to the family getting the news.
What the denial means in practical terms: the legal avenues that remain all run through other forums. The avenues are real, but they are narrow, and each one carries its own procedural clock. We lay them out honestly.
Successive state habeas under Article 11.071 § 5. Texas’s capital habeas statute permits a successive application in narrow circumstances — including when “the current claims and issues have not been and could not have been presented” in a prior application because the factual or legal basis was unavailable. The 2023 hypnosis ban may give Flores the kind of new legal basis that satisfies that standard. Whether the CCA agrees is the question.
Federal habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, as amended by AEDPA. A federal habeas petition must clear several heavy gates: a one-year statute of limitations running from the conclusion of direct review, a high deferential standard for any claim already adjudicated on the merits in state court (the “unreasonable application” standard), and procedural default for any claim not fairly presented to the state courts. The Schlup v. Delo actual-innocence gateway remains the most realistic door through federal habeas for a prisoner who can present new, reliable evidence of innocence — but the gateway is narrow and the standard is high.
Clemency. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has the authority to recommend clemency, including commutation of a death sentence. Clemency is a discretionary act, not a legal right. The Board considers many factors. A credible actual-innocence claim supported by new evidence is one of them. The timeline is long.
What about the pace of executions? Texas has executed more than 590 individuals since 1982 — more than any other state. The pace has not slowed. The risk is real, and it is the reason every remaining filing must be procedurally perfect and substantively airtight.
The Civil Path Forward — Federal Habeas, Section 1983, and the Timothy Cole Act
Here is the part of the map that most Texas families do not know exists until we show it to them. A wrongful conviction is not the end of a legal fight. It is, in some ways, the beginning of a different one.
When the state criminal process is finally exhausted — when the writ succeeds, when the pardon comes, when the conviction is set aside — a wrongfully convicted person can pursue a civil recovery against the officials whose misconduct produced the wrongful conviction. The principal vehicle is 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil rights statute that allows a person to sue state and local officials who, acting under color of law, deprived them of a federal constitutional right.
The threshold problem is Heck v. Humphrey, which bars a §1983 damages claim that would necessarily imply the invalidity of a conviction that has not been set aside. The solution is sequencing: the criminal case must end in favorable termination before the civil case can be filed for damages. That sequencing is the reason the civil recovery work cannot start until the post-conviction work is done.
But the sequencing also means that the civil case can be built in parallel, even before it can be filed. The investigation that supports a §1983 action — the personnel records of the officers involved, the training files, the pattern of similar conduct in the department, the contemporaneous statements of the witnesses — those need to be identified, preserved, and developed now, even if the complaint cannot be filed for years.
There is also a Texas statutory path. The Timothy Cole Act, codified at Chapter 103 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, provides compensation to a person who is pardoned based on actual innocence. The statute provides $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, plus lifetime health insurance, tuition reimbursement at a Texas public institution, and job-training assistance. For a person incarcerated since 1999, the statutory annuity alone approaches $2.16 million before any of the ancillary benefits. The Timothy Cole Act amount is a statutory floor — it does not preclude a separate federal civil rights verdict under §1983.
Who Can Be Sued — Officer Serna, Farmers Branch PD, and the Monell Question
A §1983 action names defendants. In a case like Flores’s, the obvious individual defendant is Officer Alfredo Roen Serna — the officer who conducted the hypnosis session without documented training. The legal theory against him would combine fabrication of evidence, due process violations under the Manson v. Brathwaite suggestive-identification framework, and potentially Brady v. Maryland violations for failure to disclose impeachment material about the hypnosis procedure.
The harder, and often more valuable, defendant is the institutional one. Under Monell v. Department of Social Services, a municipality can be held liable under §1983 when the constitutional violation was caused by an official policy, custom, or practice. That means the City of Farmers Branch itself can be on the hook if the proof shows a pattern of untrained officers conducting hypnosis, or a deliberate indifference to the known risk of the procedure, or a single decision by a final policymaker that caused the violation.
The Monell piece is where we earn our fee. Proving a municipal custom or pattern is not a one-witness case — it requires personnel files, training records, internal affairs documents, prior complaints, and the kind of institutional discovery that takes a sustained civil litigation team. It is the work the firm’s federal civil rights practice is built to do.
The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office is a more complicated target. Prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity for actions intimately associated with the judicial phase of the prosecution. That immunity has limits — it does not protect fabrication of evidence or failure to disclose Brady material — but those limits are contested and require careful development. We evaluate the DA’s-office exposure case by case.
Every individual defendant will raise qualified immunity. Qualified immunity protects officials from civil liability unless they violated a clearly established statutory or constitutional right of which a reasonable official would have known. The defense is often dispositive at the motion-to-dismiss stage. Beating it requires showing that the right was clearly established at the time of the violation — which is why the timing of every piece of misconduct matters, and why the 2023 Texas hypnosis ban, while it does not apply retroactively to Flores’s 1999 conviction, can be powerful evidence of what the scientific consensus had long established.
Evidence Preservation in a 27-Year-Old Case — What Still Exists and How Fast It Dies
Evidence is the spine of any case. In a 27-year-old wrongful conviction matter, the spine is fractured in places. Here is what we know exists, what is at risk, and what we demand the moment a family calls us.
Hypnosis session audio, video, and transcripts. These are the original recordings of Officer Serna’s session with Jill Barganier — the foundation of the due process claim. The Farmers Branch Police Department’s investigative file retention practices in the late 1990s are not the same as they are today. Police departments routinely purge investigative files on a 5–10 year rolling retention cycle. Any preserved copy of that session needs to be imaged, stored off-site, and authenticated immediately. If the original is gone, secondary sources — contemporaneous officer notes, witness interviews, the original detective’s report — must be obtained and certified.
Pre-hypnosis and post-hypnosis statements from the witness. The contradiction at the heart of the case — that the witness initially described two white men with long hair and then later identified a Hispanic man with short hair — lives in the written record of her statements. Those statements are generally preserved as trial exhibits in the Dallas County District Clerk’s office, but they need certified copies pulled before any further record loss.
Photo lineup records. The fact that Barganier failed to identify Flores in a pre-trial lineup is critical to the suggestiveness analysis. Those records should still exist in the Dallas County District Attorney’s file. They are also a frequent target of routine file purges.
1999 trial transcripts. The trial transcript establishes the in-court identification procedure, the defense cross-examination (or lack of it), and the jury instructions. Court reporter records are preserved, but some 1999-era transcripts sit on microfiche that is physically aging. Digital preservation should happen now.
TDCJ and Dallas County Jail records for the defendant. These document the date of conviction, the entire incarceration history, disciplinary record, programming, and conditions of confinement — all of which are relevant both to habeas and to a future §1983 damages claim. TDCJ routinely purges incident-level detail after 10 years; records older than that often require formal open-records requests and may have gaps.
Officer Serna’s personnel and training records. This is the highest urgency item on the list. Personnel records are routinely purged 5–10 years after separation from service. If Serna has retired or separated from the Farmers Branch Police Department, his training file may already be at risk. A Texas Public Information Act request goes out the day we are retained, seeking every training certificate, internal affairs entry, prior complaint, and hypnosis-related document in his file. If he is still on the force, the same records are equally obtainable, but the window before his eventual separation narrows every year.
The investigative window for a 27-year-old case is not closed. But it is not open forever.
Case Value — Timothy Cole Act Compensation and §1983 Civil Rights Verdicts
Two financial paths exist for a Texas exoneree, and they are not mutually exclusive.
The Timothy Cole Act (CPRC Chapter 103) is the statutory path. The Act provides $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, plus ancillary benefits: lifetime state health insurance, tuition reimbursement at a Texas public higher education institution, and job-training assistance. The statute caps none of those amounts based on jury findings — they are set by the Legislature. For 27 years of incarceration, the annuity alone approaches $2.16 million, before any ancillary benefits.
The Timothy Cole Act requires a pardon based on actual innocence. That requirement is a feature, not a bug — it ties the compensation to the State’s formal acknowledgment that the conviction was wrongful. But it also means the compensation does not arrive until the conviction is set aside.
42 U.S.C. § 1983 is the civil rights path. A successful §1983 verdict against an individual officer, a municipality under Monell, or both can produce compensatory damages for decades of lost liberty, lost earnings, psychological trauma, reputational harm, and loss of life enjoyment. Punitive damages are available against individual officers upon a showing of reckless or callous indifference to a known risk. Civil rights verdicts in Texas wrongful conviction cases have historically ranged widely depending on the length of incarceration, the county, and the egregiousness of the official misconduct — from the low seven figures to verdicts in the $5 million to $20 million+ range when the misconduct is severe and the deprivation is long.
What this page cannot tell you is what your family’s specific case is worth. The value depends on facts that exist only in your case. What we can tell you is that the two paths together — statutory annuity plus federal civil rights verdict — are how Texas exonerees with long wrongful incarcerations have historically been made whole, and how they have held the officials responsible accountable to a jury of their neighbors.
And what cannot be priced at all — the years. The birthdays. The children who grew up while a parent sat on death row. No statute or verdict prices that. The civil recovery is not a substitute for what was taken. It is what the law allows a family to use to rebuild, and to hold the people who broke them accountable.
The Defense and Insurance Playbook in Wrongful Conviction Civil Cases
If a §1983 case gets filed, the defense will run a playbook. We name the plays and the counters, because knowing what is coming is the only way to beat it.
Play one: the qualified-immunity motion to dismiss. The defendant’s first move will be a Rule 12(b)(6) motion arguing that the right was not clearly established at the time of the violation. The counter is to plead specific facts showing that, at the time of the misconduct, the constitutional violation was obvious under then-existing precedent — or, in the alternative, to plead a robust Monell claim against the municipality that survives even if individual officers escape on qualified immunity.
Play two: the Heck bar. The defense will argue that the §1983 claim is barred because it implies the invalidity of an undisposed conviction. The counter is sequencing: file only after the conviction has been set aside, and plead the case to make the favorable-termination requirement unmistakably satisfied.
Play three: the statute of limitations. Section 1983 borrows the forum state’s personal-injury limitations period. In Texas, that is generally two years under § 16.003 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, running from the favorable termination. The counter is careful docketing and, where the accrual date is contested, the development of a complete record showing when the conviction was actually invalidated.
Play four: the indemnification shell game. When the individual officer is the defendant, the municipality will often assert that it has no duty to indemnify for conduct outside the scope of employment — exactly the kind of argument designed to push the case toward an underinsured individual officer and away from the city’s policy limits. The counter is the Monell claim against the municipality itself, which is not indemnified but is directly liable under §1983.
Play five: the lowball timed to exhaustion. When a defendant municipality or insurance carrier senses the family is tired, the first settlement offer arrives. It is almost always less than the Timothy Cole Act annuity alone. The counter is the development of the full damages model before any negotiation begins — so that the family knows, in real dollars, what the case is worth before they sit across the table from anyone who wants to pay them less.
Play six: the delay. Public-entity defendants have more procedural tools to delay than any private defendant. The counter is to press the case to trial on a schedule the defense does not control. Federal civil rights cases in the Southern District of Texas can move efficiently when the plaintiff demands it.
Practical Takeaways for Texas Families
Three things we tell every Texas family who calls us after a wrongful conviction ruling.
First, do not treat the SCOTUS denial as the end. It is a procedural event, not a substantive ruling. The remaining avenues — successive state habeas, federal habeas with the Schlup gateway, executive clemency — are real, and each one is a door that has opened for similarly-situated Texas prisoners. The defense team that lost at the Supreme Court this week is not done; the case is not closed.
Second, build the civil case in parallel, even before it can be filed. The Heck bar means the §1983 complaint cannot be filed until the conviction is set aside. But the investigation that supports that complaint — the Texas Public Information Act requests, the personnel files, the hypnosis expert, the pattern discovery — can and should begin now. Every piece of evidence that exists in 2026 may not exist in 2030.
Third, do not let exhaustion drive a bad settlement. The defense knows that decades of litigation exhaust families. The first offer will reflect that. Do not take it. Get the full damages model built — Timothy Cole Act annuity plus §1983 verdict range plus punitive exposure — and then make the decision about settlement from a position of information, not exhaustion.
For the family of Betty Black, none of this is a referendum on her. She was a real victim of a real crime, and her loss deserves the respect of every courtroom that has touched her case. The work of revisiting a wrongful conviction is not a claim that no crime occurred. It is the work of making sure the person convicted of the crime was actually the person who committed it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Texas junk science law?
Article 11.073 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, enacted in 2013 through House Bill 1849, allows a person convicted of a crime to challenge the conviction by showing that scientific evidence used against them was not ascertainable through reasonable diligence at the time of trial and is now controlling on a claim of error. It is commonly called the “junk science” writ.
Is forensic hypnosis admissible in Texas now?
No. Since 2023, Article 38.22 § 6 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure makes law-enforcement-conducted investigative hypnosis evidence inadmissible in Texas criminal proceedings. The law was passed as part of House Bill 2705 by the 88th Texas Legislature.
What does the Supreme Court’s denial of cert mean?
A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits of the case. It is a decision by the Supreme Court not to hear the case. The lower court’s ruling stands, and the case must proceed through other available legal avenues — including further state habeas, federal habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, and executive clemency.
Can a wrongfully convicted person sue the police?
Yes, after the conviction is set aside. Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a person whose federal constitutional rights were violated by state or local officials acting under color of law can sue those officials for damages. The case must be filed after the conviction has been invalidated (the Heck v. Humphrey favorable-termination rule). Individual officers and municipalities can both be defendants, though prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity for many of their actions.
How long do you have to file a §1983 wrongful conviction case in Texas?
Section 1983 claims borrow the forum state’s personal-injury statute of limitations, which in Texas is generally two years under § 16.003 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. The clock typically begins to run when the conviction is finally invalidated.
What is the Timothy Cole Act?
The Timothy Cole Act, codified at Chapter 103 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, provides compensation to a person who has been pardoned based on actual innocence. The Act provides $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, plus lifetime health insurance, tuition reimbursement at a Texas public higher education institution, and job-training assistance.
How long does a §1983 wrongful conviction case take?
Federal civil rights cases typically take between 18 months and four years from filing to trial, depending on the complexity of the discovery, the court’s docket, and whether the defendant files motions to dismiss. Monell claims against municipalities often require more extensive discovery than claims against individual officers.
What is the Monell claim?
A Monell claim is a §1983 claim against a municipality, based on Monell v. Department of Social Services. A municipality can be held liable when a constitutional violation was caused by an official policy, custom, or practice. Monell claims are how plaintiffs reach the city’s insurance and make the institution — not just the individual officer — pay for the constitutional violation.
What is the Schlup actual-innocence gateway?
Schlup v. Delo established a narrow gateway through procedural-default and AEDPA bars in federal habeas cases. A petitioner who can present new, reliable evidence that no reasonable juror would have convicted them in light of that evidence can have their constitutional claims heard on the merits, even if those claims would otherwise be defaulted.
Can Betty Black’s family still participate in post-conviction proceedings?
Yes. Texas provides victim-services channels through the Office of the Attorney General and Dallas County Victim Assistance. The victim’s family has the right to be heard in parole and clemency proceedings, and in any post-conviction litigation that affects the conviction.
How Attorney911 Helps — Ralph Manginello, Lupe Peña, and Your Civil Rights Path
We are a Texas trial firm. Our principal office is in Houston, and we represent clients throughout the state in both state and federal court. We are admitted to practice in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, and our federal-court reach is the reach that matters for civil rights cases under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
Ralph Manginello is our managing partner. He has tried cases in courtrooms for 27+ years, since his admission to the Texas Bar in 1998. Before he was a lawyer, he was a trained journalist — a storyteller first, then a trial lawyer. He was a championship-team point guard before any of that, and the Cheshire Academy Athletic Hall of Fame inducted him in 2021. He has spent a career in front of juries against institutions the size of mountains, including participation in the BP Texas City refinery explosion litigation. He knows how corporate defendants and public entities build their files, because he has spent decades taking them apart.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney and the firm’s insider on how the other side works. Before he crossed to the plaintiff side, Lupe spent years inside a national insurance defense firm — the kind of firm whose adjuster is going to call your family after a verdict and the kind of firm whose attorneys are going to defend the city and the officer when a §1983 case is filed. Lupe knows how those firms build their defenses, what their valuation software looks for, and how their indemnity arguments are constructed. He serves families fully in Spanish, because Texas is a bilingual state and the families who need this help most often hear it best in their first language.
What we do is civil. We do not file habeas corpus petitions. We do not represent clients in criminal trial or appeal. What we do is the work that comes after the criminal process has run its course — the wrongful conviction civil rights case under §1983, the Monell case against the municipality, the Brady and fabrication claims against the officers, and the Timothy Cole Act compensation that Texas exonerees are entitled to by statute.
The work begins the day you call. We send Texas Public Information Act requests to preserve the personnel and training files. We retain the forensic hypnosis expert — typically a board-certified forensic psychologist — to opine on the unreliability of the session. We coordinate with the criminal post-conviction team to make sure the civil investigation supports, rather than interferes with, the habeas work. We build the damages model that will let your family negotiate from information, not exhaustion.
Our fee is contingency. The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. You pay nothing up front, and we advance the case costs. The phone — 1-888-ATTY-911 — is answered 24 hours a day. We serve Texas families in English and in Spanish — Hablamos Español.
If your brother, your son, your father is one of the Texas prisoners whose conviction rests on evidence that the Texas Legislature itself has now declared unreliable, the call we want you to make is the one that begins building the case the criminal process was never designed to deliver.
The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. Call 1-888-ATTY-911, or reach us through our contact page to begin the civil recovery work today.
This page is legal information, not legal advice for a specific case. The legal standards discussed — including Article 11.073 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, the federal habeas standard under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, the 2023 hypnosis ban under Article 38.22 § 6 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, the Timothy Cole Act under Chapter 103 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, and the federal civil rights cause of action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 — are described for general informational purposes. The application of those standards to any specific case requires a full investigation and individualized legal analysis. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.