Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-857_4357.pdf
Page Number: 47

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

15 

JACKSON, J., dissenting 

available claim by filing another §2255 motion—as the ma-
jority  maintains—Congress  has  simply  never  spoken  to 
what is supposed to happen with newly available claims of 
legal innocence.

To reach today’s conclusion, then, the majority draws a
“negative  inference”  that  Congress  intended  for  §2255’s 
“second or successive” bar to preclude successive filings that
contain legal innocence claims.  Ante, at 10.  But the major-
ity’s inferential reasoning is highly problematic in at least 
two respects. 

First, negative inferences drawn without proper context
can be notoriously unreliable.  And, as detailed below, there 
are myriad reasons for skepticism here.  Section 2255(h)’s 
anti-claim-splitting  purpose  is  one.    Another  is  the  likely
reason that legal innocence claims do not appear in the text 
of the statute (spoiler alert: they were inadvertently omit-
ted).  Background  equitable  principles  and  the  practical
consequences of preventing the filing of successive petitions 
in  this  circumstance  are  additional  key  contextual  clues
that the majority seems to have missed.

Second, I am suspicious of the majority’s choice to resort
to  inferential  reasoning  at  all,  given  that  this  Court  has 
long held that we will not read a statute to displace access 
to “the great writ” unless Congress has been clear about its 
intention to accomplish this result.  Ex parte Yerger, 8 Wall. 
85, 95, 102 (1869).  The clear-statement rule is plainly ap-
plicable here, and the majority offers the flimsiest of expla-
nations for its decision to deviate from its application at the 
threshold of today’s interpretation. 

In  short,  as  shown  below,  the  initial  assumption  that 
Congress necessarily meant for §2255(h) to bar Jones’s suc-
cessive petition asserting statutory innocence is shaky, at
best.  I would have held that Jones’s petition can proceed, 
even  without  reliance  on  the  saving  clause,  because 
§2255(h) does not bar it.