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Page Number: 17

12 

JONES v. HENDRIX 

Opinion of the Court 

to  put  to  rest.”    Wright  v.  Spaulding,  939  F. 3d  695,  707 
(CA6 2019) (Thapar, J., concurring).  Section 2255 owes its 
existence  to  Congress’  pragmatic  judgment  that  the  sen-
tencing court, not the District Court for the district of con-
finement, is the best venue for a federal prisoner’s collateral 
attack  on  his  sentence.   Channeling  a  particular  class  of
second  or  successive  attacks  back  into  §2241  would  mean
once again “[c]oncentrat[ing] ‘an inordinate number of ha-
beas  corpus  actions’  in  districts  with  large  prison  popula-
tions ” and requiring District Courts “to review each other’s 
proceedings—often  without  access  to  the  witnesses,  the
sources of evidence, or other local information that may be
critical.”  Id.,  at  707–708  (quoting  Hayman,  342  U. S.,  at 
214).  “The illogical results of applying such an interpreta-
tion  . . .  argue  strongly  against  the  conclusion  that  Con-
gress  intended  these  results.”    Western  Air  Lines,  Inc.  v. 
Board of Equalization of S. D., 480 U. S. 123, 133 (1987).

Here, as often is the case, the best interpretation is the
straightforward one.  Section 2255(h) specifies the two lim-
ited  conditions  in  which  Congress  has  permitted  federal 
prisoners to bring second or successive collateral attacks on 
their sentences.  The inability of a prisoner with a statutory
claim to satisfy those conditions does not mean that he can
bring his claim in a habeas petition under the saving clause.
It means that he cannot bring it at all.  Congress has chosen
finality over error correction in his case. 

III 
Resisting this reading, Jones and the United States both
argue  that  §2255(h)’s  exclusion  of  statutory  claims  some-
times renders §2255 inadequate or ineffective, though they 
advance  different  theories  of  when  and  why  it  does  so. 
Their arguments are unpersuasive. 

A 
Jones begins with a textual interpretation of the saving