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Page Number: 46

14 

JONES v. HENDRIX 

JACKSON, J., dissenting 

the saving clause does not apply.  On top of this, given the 
congruence purpose underlying §2255(e), an individual can
resort  to  habeas  via  §2255(e)  only  where  the  particular 
claim he seeks to bring would have been cognizable under 
pre-AEDPA principles.

Thus, the majority has no good answer to interpreting the
saving  clause  as  doing  what  Congress  crafted  it  to  do—
among  other  things,  ensuring  equivalence  between  §2255
and the prior postconviction remedy being replaced or mod-
ified, unless Congress clearly establishes otherwise.  A suc-
cessive statutory innocence claim could have been brought 
prior to the 1996 addition of §2255(h), and Congress has not 
clearly foreclosed such claims in the text of §2255.  There-
fore, the saving clause applies, and Jones should have been
permitted to raise his legal innocence claim by filing a ha-
beas petition under §2241. 

II 
The  foregoing  analysis  assumes,  as  the  majority  does,
that the only hope of a prisoner in Jones’s position is to as-
sert  his  statutory  innocence  claim  via  a  habeas  petition
filed under §2241 per the saving clause, because §2255(h) 
prevents the filing of such a successive §2255 motion.  But 
I would not be so quick to assume that a successive §2255
motion asserting statutory innocence is impermissible due 
to §2255(h).  Here is why.

Nothing  in  the  whole  of  §2255  suggests  that  Congress
ever considered the scenario presented in this case—one in
which a prisoner who has already filed a postconviction mo-
tion suddenly gets a new claim of legal innocence (after his 
first petition was filed) based on a development in Supreme
Court case law.  Therefore, it is not at all clear that Con-
gress determined that such an individual is simply out of 
luck.  Far from making the decision that a prisoner in this 
circumstance  should  not  be  permitted  to  raise  that  newly