We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
‘SAY IT AIN’T SO!’
The Supreme Court today kicked a leg out from under federal prisoners who have been convicted of an offense based on an interpretation that later is abandoned by the Supreme Court, holding in Jones v. Hendrix that § 2255(e) – the so-called saving clause – does not allow a prisoner asserting an intervening change in interpretation of a criminal statute to circumvent the law’s restrictions on filing a second or successive § 2255 motion by filing a § 2241 habeas petition.
Back in 1998, the Supreme Court seemed to endorse the use of a § 2241 petition where the strict limitations of the new Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) limited second § 2255 motions to cases where a recent Supreme Court constitutional holding or newly-discovered evidence would convince a jury that the petitioner was innocent. The problem was that many landmark criminal decisions by the Supreme Court – such as the holding that a defendant must know that he or she is in a class of people prohibited from possessing a gun (Rehaif v. United States, 2019) – do not resolve constitutional questions at all, but rather just interpret the meaning and scope of criminal statutes.
The 6-3 decision written by Justice Thomas observes that Congress created § 2255 “as a remedial vehicle by which federal prisoners could collaterally attack their sentences by motion in the sentencing court, rather than by a petition for a writ of habeas corpus under § 2241 in the district of confinement. The ‘sole purpose’ of § 2255 was to address the “serious administrative problems” created by district courts collaterally reviewing one another’s proceedings without access to needed evidence and “aggravated” by the concentration of federal prisoners in certain judicial districts that therefore faced “an inordinate number of habeas corpus actions.”
However, § 2255 contained a subsection – § 2255(e) – now known as the saving clause – which many courts (including the Supreme Court) had generally interpreted as letting prisoners file a § 2241 petition in cases where “the remedy by [2255] motion is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of [a prisoner’s] detention.”
Today, SCOTUS held that just because a change in how a law is interpreted makes someone actually innocent of the offense he or she is doing time for, such a new interpretation does not help a prisoner who has already used up his or her § 2255 motion. The Court said:
Section 2255(e)’s saving clause does not authorize that end-run around AEDPA. The clause preserves recourse to § 2241 in cases where unusual circumstances make it impossible or impracticable to seek relief in the sentencing court, as well as for challenges to detention other than collateral attacks on a sentence. But § 2255(h) specifies the two limited conditions in which federal prisoners may bring second or successive collateral attacks on their sentences. The inability of a prisoner with a statutory claim to satisfy § 2255(h) does not mean that the prisoner may bring the claim in a § 2241 petition.
Justices Sotomayor and Kagan filed a dissenting opinion. In a separate dissenting opinion, Justice Jackson wrote,
I am also deeply troubled by the constitutional implications of the nothing-to-see-here approach that the majority takes with respect to the incarceration of potential legal innocents. Apparently, legally innocent or not, Jones must just carry on in prison regardless, since (as the majority reads § 2255) no path exists for him to ask a federal judge to consider his innocence assertion. But forever slamming the courtroom doors to a possibly innocent person who has never had a meaningful opportunity to get a new and retroactively applicable claim for release reviewed on the merits raises serious constitutional concerns.
Jones v. Hendrix, Case No. 21-857 (opinion, June 22, 2023)
– Thomas L. Root