The Supreme Court just ruled that at least some federal prisoners who are completely innocent must serve out their entire sentence, with no meaningful way to challenge their unlawful conviction.
One of the most fundamental principles of criminal law is that no one may be convicted of a crime unless the legislature previously passed a law making their actions illegal. If there is no law on the books that, say, marijuana possession is unlawful, then a judge cannot toss someone in jail because they were found with a joint.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Jones v. Hendrix, handed down Thursday, does not directly attack this foundational principle. Instead, it does so indirectly by prohibiting many prisoners from ever challenging their convictions in court.
The case centers on Marcus DeAngelo Jones, a federal prisoner who was convicted in 2000 of possessing a firearm after being convicted of a felony. Nineteen years later, in Rehaif v. United States (2019), the Supreme Court held that no one may be convicted under this felon-in-possession statute unless they knew they had a felony conviction at the time that they possessed the gun.
Jones says that he (incorrectly, but genuinely) believed that his previous felony conviction had been expunged when he purchased a gun, and thus his conviction was invalid under Rehaif. In essence, he claims that no federal law criminalized his possession of a firearm, because he did not know he had a felony conviction.
Thanks to Thomas’s opinion in Jones, however, we will never know if Rehaif invalidates Jones’s conviction — that is, if he is innocent of the crime that caused him to spend nearly a quarter-century in prison — because the Court held that Jones may not challenge his conviction at all.
The reason why is a federal law, known as Section 2255, which ordinarily prevents federal prisoners from challenging their conviction or sentence more than once.
After he was sentenced, but before Rehaif raised a cloud of doubt over whether Jones belonged in prison at all, Jones successfully petitioned a federal court to vacate part of his sentence. Thomas’s opinion holds that Jones’s pre-Rehaif challenge to his sentence blew his only chance to challenge his conviction — even though Jones couldn’t have known before Rehaif was decided that he had a potentially valid claim that he is innocent.
Section 2255 contains several exceptions which allow some federal prisoners to bring a second challenge — one of which provides that Jones may bring a second challenge if § 2255’s usual process “is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention.”
But Thomas construes this “inadequate or ineffective” language very narrowly — so narrowly, in fact, that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson mocks Thomas in her dissenting opinion for ruling that someone like Jones may only seek relief “if the courthouse where a § 2255 motion would have otherwise been filed has burned to the ground or been carried away by a mudslide.”
Hellbound and Down 