UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 

FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT 

_________________________________ 

IRA WILLIE GENTRY, JR., 

 Petitioner - Appellant, 

v. 

JEFFREY H. ROSENLUND, 

 Respondent - Appellee. 

No. 22-4075 

(D.C. No. 2:22-CV-00361-DBB) 

(D. Utah) 

_________________________________ 

ORDER AND JUDGMENT*

_________________________________ 

Before PHILLIPS, MURPHY, and EID, Circuit Judges. 

_________________________________ 

Ira Willie Gentry, Jr., a former federal prisoner convicted in Arizona and now 

on supervised release in Utah, appeals the Utah district court’s dismissal of his pro se 

28 U.S.C. § 2241 petition for a writ of habeas corpus. On appeal, Gentry argues that 

he may pursue relief under § 2241 because 28 U.S.C. § 2255 is an inadequate or 

ineffective remedy. Exercising jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, we affirm the 

dismissal of his petition. 

* This order and judgment is not binding precedent, except under the doctrines 

of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral estoppel. It may be cited, however, for 

its persuasive value consistent with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 and 10th Cir. R. 32.1. 

FILED 

United States Court of Appeals 

Tenth Circuit 

November 23, 2022

Christopher M. Wolpert 

Clerk of Court

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BACKGROUND 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ira Gentry and Randy Jenkins fraudulently 

caused their company’s stock to rise in value and then sold their shares at a large 

profit—a classic pump-and-dump scheme. United States v. Jenkins, 633 F.3d 788, 

794–95 (9th Cir. 2011). During its investigation, the government sought to suspend 

the statute of limitations under 18 U.S.C. § 3292,1

 which the U.S. District Court for 

the District of Arizona granted. Id. at 796. In May 2006, a federal grand jury indicted 

Gentry and Jenkins. Id. A jury convicted Gentry of one count of conspiracy, nine 

counts of securities fraud, six counts of wire fraud, one count of tax evasion, eleven 

counts of international concealment money laundering, three counts of concealment 

money laundering, and four counts of transactional money laundering. Id. In 2009, he 

was sentenced to 180 months’ imprisonment. Id. at 796–97. Gentry timely appealed 

his conviction and sentence to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Id. 

at 793. 

“The principal legal issue” before the Ninth Circuit was whether § 3292 

suspended the running of the statute of limitations for all counts. Id. The court held 

that the government’s submissions to the district court were sufficiently reliable 

under § 3292, that the § 3292 application was timely, and that the statute of 

1

 Section 3292 empowers a district court to suspend the statute of limitations 

“if the court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that an official request has 

been made for [evidence of an offense] and that it reasonably appears, or reasonably 

appeared at the time the request was made, that such evidence is, or was, in [a] 

foreign country.” § 3292(a)(1). 

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limitations remained tolled through the date Gentry and Jenkins were indicted. Id. 

at 797–801. The court thus held that none of the counts were time-barred. Id. at 801. 

It affirmed Gentry’s convictions and sentence. Id. at 809. The Supreme Court later 

denied certiorari. Gentry v. United States, 565 U.S. 963 (2011) (mem.). 

In 2012, Gentry filed a § 2255 motion before the district court in Arizona. He 

again raised the statute-of-limitations issue, among others. In a report and 

recommendation, a magistrate judge recommended that the district court not revisit 

this claim because the Ninth Circuit had addressed it before. The district court 

adopted the report and recommendation in full and denied Gentry’s § 2255 motion. 

United States v. Gentry, No. CV-12-02210-PHX-SRB, 2013 WL 6795957, at *1 

(D. Ariz. Dec. 20, 2013). 

Gentry completed his term of custody and is now serving a term of supervised 

release in Utah. In May 2022, he filed the present § 2241 petition for a writ of habeas 

corpus before the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah. The district court 

denied his petition, finding that Gentry failed to address why the § 2255 procedure 

was inadequate or ineffective and thus had “no basis for seeking relief under § 2241.” 

Gentry v. Rosenlund, No. 2:22-CV-361, 2022 WL 3045191, at *2 (D. Utah July 11, 

2022). Gentry moved the court to reconsider its order, arguing that his prior § 2255 

motion had been ineffective in testing the statute-of-limitations claim because the 

Arizona district court had not addressed it. The court denied reconsideration, noting 

that “[e]ven if the courts that heard Gentry’s direct appeal and previous § 2255 

motion failed to address his statute-of-limitations based claims, that does not mean 

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that § 2255 provides an ineffective or inadequate mechanism to test the merits of 

those claims.” Gentry v. Rosenlund, No. 2:22-CV-361, 2022 WL 3043098, at *1 

(D. Utah Aug. 2, 2022). Gentry timely appealed the denial of his § 2241 petition. We 

now affirm. 

DISCUSSION

“We review the district court’s dismissal of a § 2241 habeas petition de novo.” 

Brace v. United States, 634 F.3d 1167, 1169 (10th Cir. 2011) (quoting Garza v. 

Davis, 596 F.3d 1198, 1203 (10th Cir. 2010)). Because Gentry is pro se, we construe 

his pleadings liberally. See Ledbetter v. City of Topeka, 318 F.3d 1183, 1187 

(10th Cir. 2003). 

A petition brought under § 2241 typically “attacks the execution of a sentence 

rather than its validity and must be filed in the district where the prisoner is 

confined.” Bradshaw v. Story, 86 F.3d 164, 166 (10th Cir. 1996). A § 2255 motion, 

on the other hand, is generally the exclusive remedy for a federal prisoner seeking to 

“attack[] the legality of detention and must be filed in the district that imposed the 

sentence.” Id. (citations omitted). 

A federal prisoner may file a § 2241 petition to challenge the legality of his 

conviction under the limited circumstances provided in § 2255’s “savings clause.” 

Under the savings clause, a § 2241 petition is appropriate if “the remedy by [§ 2255] 

motion is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention.” 28 U.S.C. 

§ 2255(e); see also Bradshaw, 86 F.3d at 166. The petitioner bears the burden of 

proving that the remedy in § 2255 is inadequate or ineffective. Prost v. Anderson, 

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636 F.3d 578, 583–84 (10th Cir. 2011). The test for applying the savings clause is 

“whether a petitioner’s argument challenging the legality of his detention could have 

been tested in an initial § 2255 motion.” Id. at 584. Section 2255 is rarely an 

inadequate or ineffective remedy to challenge a conviction. Sines v. Wilner, 609 F.3d 

1070, 1073 (10th Cir. 2010). 

Gentry contends that § 2255 is an inadequate or ineffective remedy because 

the Arizona district court did not address his statute-of-limitations claim in his prior 

§ 2255 motion. He seems to argue that this claim has never been fully adjudicated 

because the Ninth Circuit allegedly overlooked some of his statute-of-limitations 

arguments. 

Before trial, Gentry joined Jenkins’s two motions to dismiss the charges for 

violating the statute of limitations. The district court denied both motions. Gentry 

raised the statute-of-limitations issue before the Ninth Circuit on direct appeal, which 

the court analyzed and then rejected. Jenkins, 633 F.3d at 797–801. And in his § 2255 

motion, Gentry again presented the issue to the Arizona district court. The district 

court did not address the issue because it found that the Ninth Circuit already had. 

“[U]nder the law-of-the-case doctrine, courts ordinarily . . . refuse to 

reconsider arguments presented in a § 2255 motion that were raised and adjudicated 

on direct appeal.” Abernathy v. Wandes, 713 F.3d 538, 549 (10th Cir. 2013). Because 

the Ninth Circuit considered and resolved the statute-of-limitations issue, Gentry 

could not raise it again in his § 2255 motion. See Hale v. Fox, 829 F.3d 1162, 1171 

(10th Cir. 2016) (citing Varela v. United States, 481 F.3d 932, 935 (7th Cir. 2007)). 

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But Gentry’s inability to keep challenging the statute of limitations does not make 

§ 2255 an inadequate or ineffective remedial vehicle. See id. (“This procedural bar 

does not render § 2255 ‘inadequate or ineffective’ under § 2255(e).” (citation 

omitted)); Abernathy, 713 F.3d at 551 (noting that a petitioner “whose argument 

ordinarily would be barred by the law-of-the-case doctrine . . . cannot make such an 

inadequate-or-ineffective showing because his argument too could have been tested 

in his initial § 2255 motion”). 

At bottom, Gentry’s concern is not with § 2255 itself, but with how the 

Arizona district court handled his § 2255 motion. This concern is not enough to 

invoke § 2255’s savings clause. Prost, 636 F.3d at 589 (“[I]t is the infirmity of the 

§ 2255 remedy itself, not the failure to . . . prevail under it, that is determinative.”). 

And even if the Arizona district court erred in denying his § 2255 motion or by not 

considering an argument, that error “doesn’t suffice to render the § 2255 remedy 

itself inadequate or ineffective.” Id. at 585 (quoting Sines, 609 F.3d at 1073). 

CONCLUSION

Because Gentry has not shown that § 2255 was an inadequate or ineffective 

remedy, the district court correctly dismissed his § 2241 petition. We affirm. 

Entered for the Court 

Gregory A. Phillips 

Circuit Judge 

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