Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-857_4357.pdf
Page Number: 27.0

22 

JONES v. HENDRIX 

Opinion of the Court 

This elaborate theory is no more convincing than Jones’ 
arguments.    Its  most  striking  flaw  is  the  seemingly  arbi-
trary linkage it posits between the saving clause and state
prisoners’  statutory  postconviction  remedies.  While  it  is 
true that §2255, as enacted, afforded the same rights fed-
eral prisoners previously enjoyed under the general habeas 
statutes, see Hayman, 342 U. S., at 219, nothing in §2255’s 
text, structure, or history suggests that Congress intended 
any part of it to implicitly cross-reference whatever modifi-
cations to state prisoners’ postconviction remedies might be
made in the future.  Understanding the saving clause to do
so would have highly counterintuitive implications: On the 
Government’s view, §§2255(h)(1) and (h)(2) do not create an
adequacy or effectiveness problem only because of the par-
allel state-prisoner provisions in §2244(b).  It seems to fol-
low that if Congress relaxed §2244(b)’s second-or-successive
restrictions for state prisoners tomorrow, and did nothing 
else, §2255 would suddenly become “inadequate or ineffec-
tive  to  test”  at  least  some  second  or  successive  fact-based 
claims  that  did  not  satisfy  §2255(h)(1)  or  constitutional
claims  that  did  not  satisfy  §2255(h)(2),  and  that  those
claims would then be allowed to proceed under §2241.  We 
see  no  indication  that  the  spare  language  of  the  saving 
clause creates such a Rube Goldberg contrivance, whereby 
changes to other statutory provisions (which do not apply 
to federal prisoners at all) could flow back into §2255 and 
undermine §2255(h).

In any event, as the Government acknowledges, a state
prisoner could never bring a pure statutory-error claim in
federal habeas, because “ ‘federal habeas corpus relief does 

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fault.  And, to the extent Sunal addressed that question in dicta, it ap-
peared to be of two minds.  See id., at 181–183 (suggesting, in a single 
unelaborated sentence, that the petitioners’ “cases would be quite differ-
ent” had they appealed and lost, then spending two paragraphs empha-
sizing that the trial courts’ “error of law” was neither jurisdictional nor
constitutional).