Court Opinion

ID: 9490009
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:30:14.164914+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:50.773032
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I do not believe that Jones v. Arkansas, 929 F.2d 375 (8th Cir.1991) remains good law after Sawyer v. Whitley, 505 U.S. 333, 112 S.Ct. 2514, 120 L.Ed.2d 269 (1992). Sawyer, I think, holds that the actual innocence exception to the bar to hearing habeas claims applies to sentences only if the sentence is death. See United States v. Richards, 5 F.3d 1369 (10th Cir.1993). It seems to me unlikely that the Supreme Court intended to hold (or will hold) that federal sentencing errors are not barred from review when they have already been raised and rejected in a collateral proceeding, either on the merits or because they had been procedurally defaulted. I see no reason to believe, moreover, that the Supreme Court will read the “ends of justice” language to create rights for federal prisoners that state prisoners do not have under 28 U.S.C. § 2254.
Even if Jones v. Arkansas remains good law, its principle is inapplicable here. The petitioner’s complaint in this case is not that he is ineligible for the sentence imposed on him; his complaint is that he was ineligible for the conviction. In other words, he is not asserting that some sentencing statute or guideline was wrongly applied, he is asserting that the substantive criminal law was wrongly applied to him. This is what the eases have come to call “legal innocence,” and such claims cannot overcome procedural bars to habeas claims. Only factual innocence can do that. See Schlup v. Délo, 513 U.S. 298, -, 115 S.Ct. 851, 867, 130 L.Ed.2d 808 (1995); Pitts v. Norris, 85 F.3d 348, 350 (8th Cir.1996).
The court’s decision, moreover, undermines numerous decisions of this court and others that hold that a person convicted of a federal crime must raise objections to his sentence in the district court and on appeal before he can proceed under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. Ramey v. United States, 8 F.3d 1313, 1314 (8th Cir.1993); United States v. Wilson, 997 F.2d 429, 431 (8th Cir.1993); United States v. Ward, 55 F.3d 412, 413 (8th Cir.1995). It is true that in this case the government argued only that the prisoner’s petition was successive, not that the petitioner had defaulted (although he had), but the actual innocence exception operates to lift the procedural bar in the same way in both contexts. The effect of today’s ruling is therefore not only that claims actually decided adversely to a prisoner complaining of a *812statutory sentencing error by a federal court are entitled to an infinite number of successive reviews; it means also that a procedural default is never a bar to an initial collateral review of an alleged federal sentencing error, or indeed to any number of successive ones thereafter. This holding is all the more remarkable because it comes in a legal environment in which the law of habeas corpus is tending more and more toward adopting the principles of res judicata that obtain in other kinds of civil proceedings.
I therefore respectfully dissent.