Because Jones had already challenged his conviction once before the change, federal law bars a second motion “based solely on a more favorable interpretation of statutory law adopted after his conviction became final and his initial … motion was resolved,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for his conservative colleagues.
The liberal justices disagreed in two separate dissents.
Under the decision, a “prisoner who is actually innocent, imprisoned for conduct that Congress did not criminalize, is forever barred … from raising that claim, merely because he previously sought postconviction relief,” Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote in a two-page opinion. “It does not matter that an intervening decision of this Court confirms his innocence. By challenging his conviction once before, he forfeited his freedom.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s rebuttal stretched for 39 pages, and was even more critical of the majority.
“I am also deeply troubled by the constitutional implications of the nothing-to-see-here approach that the majority takes with respect to the incarceration of potential legal innocents,” Jackson wrote. She added that “forever slamming the courtroom doors to a possibly innocent person who has never had a meaningful opportunity to get a new and retroactively applicable claim for release reviewed on the merits raises serious constitutional concerns.”
Jackson noted she was not taking a position on “whether Jones’s legal innocence claim is actually meritorious.”
Jones was sentenced to 27 years in prison for possessing a firearm as a felon and making false statements to obtain a firearm. Jones said during his trial that he was aware of his felon status but believed his plea agreement had expunged his conviction. Jones challenged his conviction and got one of his concurrent sentences vacated but no other relief.
A decade later, the Supreme Court ruled in Rehaif v. United States that the government must prove that a defendant knew it was illegal for him to own a firearm because of his felon status. Jones hoped to use the ruling to show that the government had not proved that in his case.
Federal law allows inmates to challenge the legality of their convictions. And they also get a chance to challenge their detention.
But Thomas said that Jones had used up his chances and that allowing him another would “circumvent” the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which Congress passed to bar successive appeals. The only exceptions are newly discovered evidence or a new rule of constitutional law, Thomas said, not the kind of statutory interpretation the court made in Rehaif.
He was joined in the decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
The case is Jones v. Hendrix.
