Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-857_4357.pdf
Page Number: 52.0

20 

JONES v. HENDRIX 

JACKSON, J., dissenting 

law  despite  §2255(h)’s  successive-petition  bar  also  meant
for §2255(h) to preclude Jones from bringing the claim that 
he seeks to file here. 

2 
The majority’s negative inference also rests on the bald 
assumption that Congress intentionally left statutory inno-
cence  out  of  its  list  of  carveouts,  because  it  wanted  those 
claims to be barred if brought in a successive petition.  Ante, 
at 12 (asserting that “Congress has chosen finality over er-
ror  correction”  with  respect  to  statutory  innocence  claims
brought  in  successive  petitions  (emphasis  added)).    But 
there is a perfectly logical alternative explanation for why 
statutory innocence claims do not appear as express exclu-
sions in the text of §2255(h), an explanation that is based 
on another important contextual reference point: the enact-
ment history of the statute.

Section 2255(h) was enacted in the same Public Law as
§2244(b),  a  provision  that  contains  analogous  second-or-
successive petition limitations for state prisoners.  Indeed, 
Congress  “appears  to  have  modeled  §2255(h)(2)”  on  those 
state-prisoner provisions.  Chazen v. Marske, 938 F. 3d 851, 
863 (CA7 2019) (Barrett, J., concurring) (citing R. Fallon, J. 
Manning,  D.  Meltzer,  &  D.  Shapiro,  Hart  and  Wechsler’s
The Federal Courts and the Federal System 1362 (7th ed.
2015)  (Hart  &  Wechsler)).    Like  §2255(h),  §2244(b)—the 
model  provision—does  not  address  statutory  innocence 
claims in any fashion.  But that is simply because there is 
no such thing as a statutory innocence claim in the realm
of federal collateral relief for state prisoners.  See Hart & 
Wechsler 1362; see also Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U. S. 62, 67 
(1991) (“[F]ederal habeas corpus relief does not lie for errors 
of state law” (internal quotation marks omitted)). 

Thus,  as  others  have  observed,  when  Congress  crafted
§2255(h) based on the state-prisoner model in §2244(b), it