The Supreme Court’s latest opinion means innocent people must remain in prison
Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion ensures that innocent people will spend years behind bars.
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The Supreme Court’s latest opinion means innocent people must remain in prison
Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion ensures that innocent people will spend years behind bars.
By Ian Millhiser Jun 22, 2023, 3:10pm EDT
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72393426/894670852.0.jpg "A prisoner’s hand hangs out a cell door inside a punishment cell wing at Angola prison in Louisiana.")
The Supreme Court decision in Jones v. Hendrix will make it harder for prisoners to challenge their convictions in court. Giles Clarke/Getty Images
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court just ruled that at least some federal prisoners who are completely innocent must serve out their entire sentence, with no meaningful way to challenge their unlawful conviction.
One of the most fundamental principles of criminal law is that no one may be convicted of a crime unless the legislature previously passed a law making their actions illegal. If there is no law on the books that, say, marijuana possession is unlawful, then a judge cannot toss someone in jail because they were found with a joint.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Jones v. Hendrix, handed down Thursday, does not directly attack this foundational principle. Instead, it does so indirectly by prohibiting many prisoners from ever challenging their convictions in court.
The case centers on Marcus DeAngelo Jones, a federal prisoner who was convicted in 2000 of possessing a firearm after being convicted of a felony. Nineteen years later, in Rehaif v. United States (2019), the Supreme Court held that no one may be convicted under this felon-in-possession statute unless they knew they had a felony conviction at the time that they possessed the gun.
Jones says that he (incorrectly, but genuinely) believed that his previous felony conviction had been expunged when he purchased a gun, and thus his conviction was invalid under Rehaif. In essence, he claims that no federal law criminalized his possession of a firearm, because he did not know he had a felony conviction.
Thanks to Thomas’s opinion in Jones, however, we will never know if Rehaif invalidates Jones’s conviction — that is, if he is innocent of the crime that caused him to spend nearly a quarter-century in prison — because the Court held that Jones may not challenge his conviction at all.
The reason why is a federal law, known as Section 2255, which ordinarily prevents federal prisoners from challenging their conviction or sentence more than once.
After he was sentenced, but before Rehaif raised a cloud of doubt over whether Jones belonged in prison at all, Jones successfully petitioned a federal court to vacate part of his sentence. Thomas’s opinion holds that Jones’s pre-Rehaif challenge to his sentence blew his only chance to challenge his conviction — even though Jones couldn’t have known before Rehaif was decided that he had a potentially valid claim that he is innocent.
Section 2255 contains several exceptions which allow some federal prisoners to bring a second challenge — one of which provides that Jones may bring a second challenge if § 2255’s usual process “is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention.”
But Thomas construes this “inadequate or ineffective” language very narrowly — so narrowly, in fact, that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson mocks Thomas in her dissenting opinion for ruling that someone like Jones may only seek relief “if the courthouse where a § 2255 motion would have otherwise been filed has burned to the ground or been carried away by a mudslide.”
Under Thomas’s majority opinion, it will not just be people like Jones — people convicted under the felon-in-possession gun statute, to whom Rehaif offered new hope — who will be denied second chances at overturning their convictions. Many other people who committed no crime whatsoever will also be denied these rare-but-occasionally-legal second appeals, and will languish in prison.
Thomas’s opinion is “entirely atextual”
To understand Thomas’s reasoning, it’s helpful to understand the history of how § 2255 became law.Before its enactment in 1948, federal prisoners who wished to challenge their conviction were required to do so in the federal judicial district where they were incarcerated. This system was unworkable, because it placed an extraordinary burden on federal trial courts that happened to be located in the same geographic district as a federal prison.
Additionally, because prisoners are often incarcerated far from where they were tried and convicted, the court that heard a prisoner’s challenge often did not have easy access to records, evidence, and witnesses it needed to weigh the prisoner’s arguments.
Section 2255 fixed this problem by requiring prisoners to challenge their convictions in the same court that originally tried and convicted them. This meant that the burden of hearing these cases, known as “habeas” petitions, would be distributed equitably among the federal district courts. And it also meant that the court most familiar with a prisoner’s case would also hear any habeas suits challenging that prisoner’s confinement.
Ordinarily, § 2255 does not allow a prisoner to bring a second habeas challenge if they were previously denied such relief, but the law permits a second challenge to proceed if § 2255’s ordinary processes are “inadequate or ineffective to test the legality” of a prisoner’s detention.
After the Supreme Court ruled in Bailey v. United States (1995) that a federal law prohibiting the use of a firearm in certain drug crimes should be read more narrowly than many courts had interpreted it, for example, most federal appeals courts permitted prisoners convicted under a broader interpretation of the law to challenge their convictions, even if they’d previously filed another habeas petition.
Thomas, however, characterizes these post-Bailey decisions as an “end-run” around federal law’s limits on habeas petitions. And he construes § 2255’s “inadequate or ineffective” provision so narrowly that there are unlikely to be many cases where it applies at all to a prisoner fighting an unlawful conviction.
In Thomas’s telling, the main purpose of this “inadequate or ineffective” provision is to protect prisoners who are unable to bring a habeas challenge in the court where they were originally convicted — such as if Congress later passed a law eliminating that court. Indeed, in a footnote, Thomas suggests that the “inadequate or ineffective” provision may largely be a relic of an age before the federal interstate highway system was built, when transporting a prisoner to the judicial district where they were convicted “posed difficulties daunting enough to make a § 2255 proceeding practically unavailable.”
One problem with Thomas’s reading of § 2255, as Justice Jackson writes in dissent, is that it is “entirely atextual.” Both Thomas and Jackson agree about the history of why § 2255 was originally enacted in 1948 — to alleviate the burden placed on district courts located near federal prisons. But the statute itself contains no language whatsoever suggesting that its “inadequate or ineffective” provision applies only when the court that would ordinarily hear a § 2255 case is inaccessible or unavailable.
Here is the entire relevant subsection of § 2255, quoted in full:
This language does place some burdens on prisoners. It normally precludes habeas relief if a prisoner “failed to apply for relief” in the court that sentenced them, and it also precludes most prisoners from seeking relief from a court that’s already denied it to them. But the “inadequate or ineffective” exception to these general rules is broadly worded, and does not contain any language supporting Thomas’s interpretation of the law.
