Texas Rangers were using hypnosis to investigate crimes up until last year

• The Texas Rangers announced they will no longer use hypnosis in criminal investigations.
• The organization had been using the technique in interrogations for more than 40 years.
• The organization said it now has "more advanced interview and interrogation techniques."

The Texas Rangers - one of the country's most prominent law-enforcement agencies - has stopped using the long-discredited tactic of hypnosis during investigations.

The Rangers, which are part of the Texas Department of Public Safety, had been using hypnosis to question people for more than four decades before ending the practice in January, according to the Dallas Morning News.

"DPS has developed more advanced interview and interrogation techniques that yield better results," a spokesperson for the DPS told the newspaper on Thursday.

Last year, the Dallas Morning news, released a two-part investigation of the Rangers' use of hypnosis in cases that put dozens of men and women behind bars, some of whom ended up on death row.

The investigation found the agency used the practice in more than 1,700 incidents.

The Dallas Morning News reported officers in the agency carried out at least eight hypnosis sessions last year, including three in murder cases. New information came out of seven of the sessions, The Dallas Morning News said.

The efficacy of hypnosis in reviving memories has been debated for years, but experts warn it can distort witnesses' memories and lead to false convictions, according to a 2019 report from the Guardian.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has also said hypnosis "does not work well as a memory-recovery method."

"People who have been hypnotized tend to feel confident that their memories are accurate, contributing to the persistence of false memories," the medical school says on its website.

A panel of 28 cognitive science experts gave testimony to the US Supreme Court earlier this year about hypnosis, particularly in the case of Charles Flores, who was convicted of murder in Texas in a case in which evidence was based on hypnosis, AFP reported.

The scientists said at the time hypnosis can create "inaccuracies, false memories, and the creation of 'super' witnesses who are unnaturally confident, often impervious to cross-examination, and therefore disproportionately impactful."

It's unclear why the Rangers used hypnosis for so long, or what interrogation techniques they're using now.