Whether a state court violates due process by arbitrarily refusing to consider newly discovered evidence of actual innocence in a death penalty case despite state procedural mechanisms designed to review such claims

No question identified. : APPLICATION To the Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court and Circuit Justice for the Fifth Circuit: Under 28 U.S.C. § 2101(¢) and this Court’s Rule 13.5, Applicant Charles Don Flores hereby moves for an extension of time from January 7, 2026, to no later than February 17, 2026, for the filing of a petition for writ of certiorari. Mr. Flores seeks this one-time, 42-day extension for the following reasons: 1. This Court has jurisdiction to grant this application under 28 U.S.C. § 1257(a) and 28 U.S.C. § 2101(c). 2. Mr. Flores seeks review of a decision of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’s criminal court of last resort. The decision, dated October 9, 2025, dismissed his habeas application in this death-penalty case without considering the merits of any claims. See Exhibit A. 3. Absent an extension, Mr. Flores’s petition for writ of certiorari would be due on January 7, 2026. In accordance with Supreme Court Rule 13.5, this application is being filed more than 10 days before that date. 4. Mr. Flores was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in Dallas County, Texas in 1999 for the 1998 murder of Betty Black during a home invasion. He has consistently maintained his innocence. He has amassed significant evidence that his conviction was obtained through junk science and police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence which no court has yet considered. That evidence includes the fact, never disclosed by the State, that the co-defendant and actual shooter was the son of a local police officer whose department was involved in the underlying murder investigation and who, as a known drug dealer/addict, was, at the time of the murder, employed, along with his brother, as an informant with the narcotics unit with jurisdiction over the murder investigation. Due to deficient representation and the absence of any resources, investigation of the facts underlying this wrongful conviction was not even initiated until Mr. Flores’s first execution warrant was signed in 2016. His execution date was then stayed by order of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to permit development of a narrow issue involving the State’s reliance on an identification obtained from a witness 13 months after-the-fact and after that witness had been subjected to “investigative hypnosis” by police officers involved in the underlying murder investigation at the police station. 5. The State’s reliance on “investigative hypnosis” to obtain inculpatory evidence mid-trial was, however, far from the only issue casting doubt on the integrity of the conviction. After Mr. Flores obtained new counsel, who commenced trying to uncover long-buried information largely missing from a heavily redacted and purged police file, Mr. Flores amassed voluminous evidence supporting his pursuit of a writ of habeas corpus. That new evidence includes a detailed report from a leading expert on the current consensus in the field of eyewitness memory and the limits and import of eyewitness identification testimony (Dr. John Wixted). This new evidence was amassed to demonstrate that Mr. Flores had established the right, pursuant to state law, to present to a state court his claims of changed science, actual innocence, official misconduct, and other federal and state law violations. This new evidence was presented to Texas’s highest criminal court, but to no avail. In multiple state court proceedings in which Mr. Flores has alleged substantive claims based on new, previously undiscoverable evidence and in which he has endeavored to rely on a state procedural law enacted expressly to address circumstances of this nature, he has been repeatedly barred, based on unexplained procedural grounds. See, e.g., Exhibit A. 6. A petition for writ of certiorari is essential in this case because Mr. Flores is under a death sentence and his post-conviction case presents substantial, important, and recurring questions of sys