Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-857_4357.pdf
Page Number: 57.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

25 

JACKSON, J., dissenting 

and for all time, his right to rely on any new retroactive Su-
preme  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  “straightfor-
ward” 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 pre-
clude 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. 

B 
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 stat-
ute, ante, at 12, would have been to apply our clear-state-
ment rule to today’s interpretation. 

1 

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 Cas-
tro, 540 U. S., at 381).  This principle recognizes that Con-
gress 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, 121–