Page:Jones v. Hendrix.pdf/57

Rh and for all time, his right to rely on any new retroactive Supreme Court opinion that suggests he is incarcerated for noncriminal behavior. There is no indication that Congress meant for Jones and other prisoners in his position to have to choose between pursing an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim and a claim of legal innocence.

Despite all this, the majority clings to its “straightforward” negative inference and interprets §2255(h) as a bar to a court’s consideration of Jones’s legal innocence claim. My point is that, with so many contextual indicators that Congress did not really mean for §2255(h) to be read to preclude new claims of statutory innocence, the Court should have simply determined that Jones’s petition, which asserts such a claim, was not plainly barred by §2255(h), and could thus proceed in a successive §2255 petition.

Instead of drawing an inference about the operation of §2255(h), the most “straightforward” way of determining whether Jones’s legal innocence claim is precluded by statute,, would have been to apply our clear-statement rule to today’s interpretation.

A “longstanding rule” of this Court, INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U. S. 289, 298 (2001), the clear-statement rule directs that, before interpreting a congressional enactment as “ ‘clos[ing the Court’s] doors to a class of habeas petitioners,’ ” the Court must search for a “ ‘clear indication that such was Congress’ intent,’ ” Panetti, 551 U. S., at 946 (quoting Castro, 540 U. S., at 381). This principle recognizes that Congress must “speak unambiguously when it seeks to effect a result that, although constitutional, would undermine a constitutionally derived value.” J. Manning, Textualism and the Equity of the Statute, 101 Colum. L. Rev. 1,