Opinion ID: 3043840
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: introduction

Text: For fifteen years we have erroneously interpreted the savings clause to mean that a prisoner may file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, evade the bar on second or successive motions, and circumvent the one-year statute of limitations if a decision of the Supreme Court “busts” circuit precedent that previously foreclosed the prisoner’s claim. See Bryant, 738 F.3d at 1274; Williams v. Warden, Fed. Bureau of Prisons, 713 F.3d 1332 (11th Cir. 2013); Gilbert v. United States, 640 F.3d 1293 (11th Cir. 2011) (en banc); Wofford v. Scott, 177 F.3d 1236 (11th Cir. 1999). But whether the law of our Circuit—or in this appeal the law of another circuit—was once adverse to a prisoner has nothing to do with whether his motion to vacate his sentence is “inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention.” A motion to vacate under section 2255 allows a federal prisoner to challenge the legality of his sentence, but a petition for a writ of habeas corpus under section 2241 allows that prisoner to challenge the legality of his detention in ways that section 2255 cannot remedy. Only then is the motion to vacate “inadequate or ineffective.” Beginning with Wofford, we have fumbled the meaning of twenty simple words at the end of the following provision: 10 Case: 13-12161 Date Filed: 09/10/2014 Page: 11 of 55 An application for a writ of habeas corpus in behalf of a prisoner who is authorized to apply for relief by motion pursuant to this section, shall not be entertained if it appears that the applicant has failed to apply for relief, by motion, to the court which sentenced him, or that such court has denied him relief, unless it also appears that the remedy by motion is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention. 28 U.S.C. § 2255(e) (emphasis added). When we first endeavored to interpret that text, we went straight to the legislative history of the clause to divine its meaning, but unsurprisingly could find no clues. Wofford, 177 F.3d at 1241, 1241–42 n.2. But see United States v. Pub. Util. Comm’n of Cal., 345 U.S. 295, 319–21, 73 S. Ct. 706, 719–20 (1953) (Jackson, J., concurring) (“I should concur in this result more readily if the Court could reach it by analysis of the statute instead of by psychoanalysis of Congress. . . . Legislative history here as usual is more vague than the statute we are called upon to interpret.”). We later stated that “the statute says precious little about what it means . . . to have been ‘inadequate’ or ‘ineffective,’” Williams, 713 F.3d at 1341, even though that problem of statutory interpretation is common. To be sure, there are no definitions in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, but think of the multitude of statutes we must interpret each day that leave us to our own wits to understand their meaning. Our precedents have failed to consider the ordinary meaning of the text of the savings clause. We have not even tried to interpret the ordinary meaning of its key terms, such as “inadequate,” “ineffective,” “test,” and “detention.” In Wofford, 11 Case: 13-12161 Date Filed: 09/10/2014 Page: 12 of 55 we instead adopted, for the sake of argument, the approach of the Seventh Circuit because it was purportedly “better reasoned than those of the other circuits, and its rule ha[d] the advantage of being specific.” 177 F.3d at 1244. There are many descriptors for our interpretation of the savings clause—overly complex, divorced from the text, wrong—but “better reasoned” and “specific” are not two of them. Our flawed interpretation reached its pinnacle late last year when a federal prisoner named Dudley Bryant returned to our Court. Bryant had previously filed two motions to vacate his sentence and an application to file a third, but then petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, 28 U.S.C. 2241, on the ground that he had been erroneously classified as a violent felon under the Armed Career Criminal Act, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e). Before Bryant’s appeal, our interpretation of the savings clause explained only why a prisoner’s claim failed under the savings clause and, as a result, was dicta. See Gilbert, 640 F.3d at 1307, 1319. To decide Bryant’s claim, a panel of our Court distilled from our dicta in Wofford, Gilbert, and Williams the following five-step test: Bryant must establish that (1) throughout his sentencing, direct appeal, and first § 2255 proceeding, our Circuit’s binding precedent had specifically addressed Bryant’s distinct prior state conviction that triggered § 924(e) and had squarely foreclosed Bryant’s § 924(e) claim that he was erroneously sentenced above the 10-year statutory maximum penalty in § 924(a); (2) subsequent to his first § 2255 proceeding, the Supreme Court’s decision in Begay [v. United States, 553 U.S. 137, 128 S. Ct. 1581 (2008)], as extended by this Court to Bryant’s distinct prior conviction, overturned our Circuit precedent that had squarely foreclosed Bryant’s § 924(e) claim; (3) the new rule 12 Case: 13-12161 Date Filed: 09/10/2014 Page: 13 of 55 announced in Begay applies retroactively on collateral review; (4) as a result of Begay’s new rule being retroactive, Bryant’s current sentence exceeds the 10-year statutory maximum authorized by Congress in § 924(a); and (5) the savings clause in § 2255(e) reaches his pure § 924(e)-Begay error claim of illegal detention above the statutory maximum penalty in § 924(a). Bryant, 738 F.3d at 1274. And for the first time, our Court granted relief to a federal prisoner, thereby rendering this five-step, atextual, Rube Goldbergian rule the law of our Circuit. In Bryant, we failed in our task as a Court to interpret the text of the savings clause that Congress wrote in 1948 and to make sense of that text so as not to circumvent provisions of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that Congress later adopted in 1996. See Anderson v. Wilson, 289 U.S. 20, 27, 53 S. Ct. 417, 420 (1933) (“We do not pause to consider whether a statute differently conceived and framed would yield results more consonant with fairness and reason. We take the statute as we find it.”); see also Antonin Scalia & Bryan Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 348 (2012) (“[A]lthough properly informed human minds may agree on what a text means, human hearts often disagree on what is right. That is why we vote . . . on what the law ought to be, but leave it to experts of interpretation called judges to decide what an enacted law means.”). We not only abandoned the text of the clause itself, but we also adopted a rule at war with the provisions of the statute that limit a movant’s ability to file a second or successive motion, 28 U.S.C. § 2255(h), and that limit the 13 Case: 13-12161 Date Filed: 09/10/2014 Page: 14 of 55 statute of limitations to one year, id. § 2255(f). Moreover, that rule undercuts the interest in finality that pervades the Act. The text of the savings clause creates a rule that is both easy to understand and easy to apply. When read in harmony with the other provisions of the Act, the savings clause allows a federal prisoner to file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus only when he attacks the execution of his sentence or when his sentencing court no longer exists. For example, a prisoner who challenges the deprivation of good-time credits or parole determinations may file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus because a motion to vacate his sentence is “inadequate or ineffective” to test that aspect of his detention. See, e.g., Hajduk v. United States, 764 F.2d 795, 796 (11th Cir. 1985). Or, for example, a military prisoner whose sentencing court no longer exists must have a forum for his one opportunity to challenge the legality of his sentence. See Prost v. Anderson, 636 F.3d 578, 588 (10th Cir. 2011). But only in those kinds of limited circumstances is section 2255 “inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention.” Id. § 2255(e).