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Rh also Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language 1239, 1255 (1942) (similar). For example, §2255 would not be up to the task if it would be impossible or impracticable for a federal prisoner to file a §2255 petition. ,.

The case before us involves another way that §2255 can be inadequate or ineffective—where the newly created §2255 procedure, perhaps inadvertently, blocks a prisoner from bringing a claim that was previously cognizable in habeas. This is an inadequacy concerning the operation of §2255 from Congress’s perspective, because the “sole purpose” of §2255 “was to minimize the difficulties encountered in habeas corpus hearings” while still “affording the same rights in another and more convenient forum.” Hayman, 342 U. S., at 219 (emphasis added); see also Davis v. United States, 417 U. S. 333, 343 (1974) (“Th[e] history makes clear that §2255 was intended to afford federal prisoners a remedy identical in scope to federal habeas corpus” (emphasis added)); Sanders v. United States, 373 U. S. 1, 14 (1963) (“[I]t conclusively appears from the historic context in which §2255 was enacted that the legislation was intended simply to provide in the sentencing court a remedy exactly commensurate with that which had previously been available by habeas corpus” (emphasis added; internal quotation marks omitted)).

That much is not in dispute—the majority acknowledges that Congress intended to maintain equivalence with the claims available in habeas when it enacted §2255. See. Consequently, in any circumstance in which the new §2255 procedure actually operates to foreclose a postconviction claim that a prisoner could have brought previously in a habeas petition, the §2255 process is patently inadequate to accomplish Congress’s aim of allowing prisoners to test the legality of their detention under §2255 to the same extent as they could have in the habeas regime that §2255 replaced.