Page:Jones v. Hendrix.pdf/70

38 review, and ends with the realization that only an arbitrarily determined sliver of eligible prisoners (those who have not had the temerity to file a prior motion) are actually in a position to even ask a court to consider whether any such relief might be provided.

It is quite clear that the Court’s rulings in this area of the law reflect a general ethos that convicted prisoners should not be permitted to file §2255 motions or obtain postconviction relief at all. But what matters is what Congress wants with respect to the operation of the statutory provisions it enacts. And, as I have shown, Congress’s aim in crafting §2255 was to permit convicted prisoners to file postconviction motions asserting claims for collateral relief in a manner that also curbs abusive filings. Congress did not speak—one way or the other—as to what should happen if a prisoner who has previously filed a §2255 motion gets a new claim of legal innocence due to an intervening change in the law.

Given Congress’s silence on this matter, in my view, there is simply no justification for drawing a negative inference that Congress meant for §2255 to operate in a manner that is patently inconsistent with the reasons it passed that statute, or the background principles that animated the law more broadly at the time of the statute’s enactment, or even (possibly) core constitutional principles. Instead, §2255(e) should be read—consistent with Congress’s general intent to ensure equivalence between the claims available in habeas and those that its new postconviction mechanism allowed—to permit prisoners who have a new and retroactive statutory innocence claim to file a habeas petition in lieu of a §2255 motion. Alternatively, we should honor Congress’s clear interest in preserving a prisoner’s ability to have one meaningful opportunity to have all of his claims presented to a court, by allowing Jones to file a petition asserting his new and retroactive claim of statutory innocence, notwithstanding what might otherwise be perceived as an ironclad