This term, in a case involving a Missouri man imprisoned for over 20 years for possessing a gun as a felon, the high court will decide whether federal prisoners can file writs of habeas corpus after new case law makes them legally innocent.
The case, Jones v. Hendrix, focuses on a technicality: a provision in Title 28, Section 2255 of the U.S. Code known as a "safety valve" or "savings clause" allowing federal prisoners who are barred from filing motions to vacate their convictions to use habeas petitions instead.
Marcus Deangelo Jones was convicted in 2000 and sentenced to 27 years in prison. He now argues that in light of the 2019 Supreme Court decision in Rehaif v. United States
, which held that proving intent is necessary to convict a person under the federal felon-in-possession statute, he was never guilty.After hearing oral arguments on Nov. 1, the justices may decide to give him a path to freedom, potentially creating an exit door for thousands of people who are languishing in federal prisons for what are no longer crimes.
"This case is about whether habeas corpus can remain, as it's been for centuries, a meaningful remedy to correct unlawful detentions," said Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law and a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Center for Democracy.
Because federal prisoners are a small fraction of the people who are incarcerated in the United States, the ruling in Jones v. Hendrix won't be as sweeping as other high court decisions delving into the habeas process, such as the one in Shinn v. Ramirez during the past term, which severely limited access to the writ. There are currently about 158,000 people in federal custody, according to government data, and only a subset of them can seek habeas relief. But scholars say the case is still important because it could remedy wrongs in the justice system.
"It matters a lot in the particular cases to which it does apply because, arguably, someone is serving time in prison for something that isn't a crime," said Daniel R. Ortiz, director of the University of Virginia School of Law's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, who represents Jones.
Unlike with habeas cases involving federal courts reviewing state court convictions, which raise issues of federalism, in the Jones v. Hendrix case the court would focus on federal criminal law, an area where there is less ideological division among justices.
"This is not the kind of habeas [Justice Samuel] Alito hates so much," said John H. Blume, a professor of criminal procedure at Cornell University Law School.
Brandon L. Garrett, a habeas corpus scholar at Duke University School of Law, pointed out that the court has ruled several times in recent years to correct lower courts' interpretation of federal law on issues such as sentencing enhancements for crack offenders and career criminals, and the level of intent needed to commit certain federal crimes. In those decisions, the issue of retroactivity has come up prominently.
The ruling in Jones v. Hendrix will give the Supreme Court an opportunity to clarify how its decisions apply retroactively, a topic on which lower courts need guidance, he said.
"The Supreme Court has, to its credit, made clear that there have been quite a few errors in the ways that lower courts were interpreting both federal crimes and federal sentencing schemes," Garrett said. "Now, we need to make sure that the lower courts actually grant the relief to the people who were incorrectly convicted and sentenced."
Garrett, who studies wrongful convictions, said the traditional standard for determining the seriousness of a legal error warranting habeas relief has been that a convicted person could be factually innocent — what is called a miscarriage of justice. But a miscarriage of justice is not a real legal term, he said, and federal courts have been increasingly interested in addressing other ways the justice system can make mistakes.
"Courts are starting to grapple with this and realize there are other ways that serious errors can happen. And some of them are just as serious as being innocent to the conduct," Garrett said. "This case is one among many opportunities to make sure that those post-conviction remedies are meaningful."
Jones' Unsuccessful Attempts to Use the Habeas Process
Jones, who had served time in Tennessee as a young adult for drug crimes, was convicted by a jury on July 25, 2000, of one count of making false statements to acquire a firearm and two counts of possessing a firearm as a felon.
At trial, he testified that he didn't know he was a felon at the time he purchased a 9 mm handgun at a Missouri pawn shop. But first the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, then a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit, told him that didn't matter.
Affirming his conviction on Sept. 12, 2001, the panel cited its own precedent in United States v. Kind, declaring that "the government need not prove knowledge, but only the fact of a prior felony conviction," to prove that a defendant was guilty under the felon-in-possession statute. In the following two decades he spent behind bars, Jones sought to have his convictions tossed with claims of ineffective counsel, Brady violations and other constitutional errors, to no avail.
Then, on June 21, 2019, came the big break with the Rehaif decision. The Supreme Court ruled that to convict someone under the federal felon-in-possession statute, prosecutors must prove that the defendant knew both that he was a felon, and that he possessed a gun.
The ruling completely changed the equation in Jones' case. In that new interpretation of the law, Jones saw a path to freedom. Only eight days after the decision came down, he filed a habeas corpus petition arguing the law under which he was convicted had been made null.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, and then the Eighth Circuit, however, denied him habeas relief, saying they lacked jurisdiction in hearing his claims. They argued he could not ask for a writ, because Section 2255's safety valve could not be triggered in his case.
Jones, who is now 46 years old and is slated for release on Sept. 7, 2023, didn't let go. Ortiz filed a petition for certiorari on his behalf on Dec. 7, 2021, asking the Supreme Court to resolve a "deep and mature circuit split" on the reach of the safety valve. On May 16, the justices agreed to hear the case.
The Technical Issue at the Core of the Case
In 1948, Congress gave federal prisoners the option to challenge their sentence or conviction by filing a motion under Section 2255 of Title 28 of the U.S. Code, largely replacing the traditional habeas action process, which requires filing a petition under Section 2241.
The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law that shaped habeas corpus into what it is today, limited successive challenges brought under Section 2255 to claims that indicate factual innocence or rely on constitutional aw decisions made retroactive by the Supreme Court.
Under Section 2255's safety valve clause, federal prisoners can still file traditional petitions for habeas corpus but with one crucial requirement: They must show the Section 2255 motion process is "inadequate or ineffective" in addressing their claims.
That mechanism is now at the center of Jones' case. Respondent Dewayne Hendrix, formerly the warden of the federal prison in Forrest City, Arkansas, where Jones was held at time of his latest habeas petition, argued in the opposition brief that no court granted habeas relief to inmates following the Rehaif decision, and that even if case law were to favor Jones, the evidence in his case showed he knew he was a felon when he acquired the firearm.
But Ortiz said Hendrix's position imperils the habeas process.
"Our opponent says: 'Well, it doesn't actually matter whether the court applies the right law or not. They can be applying the wrong law. The only thing that matters is whether you have the formal opportunity to make the claim,'" he said. "That's the core of what we're arguing about."
U.S. circuit courts have disagreed whether the safety valve is triggered by Supreme Court decisions that retroactively declare certain conduct not criminal.
The Eighth, Tenth and Eleventh Circuits deny habeas relief in those circumstances. By contrast, the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth Circuits all allow prisoners to file Section 2241 petitions when they have claims of legal innocence following a high court ruling.
On Aug. 12, 2002, while serving time in federal prison in Texas, Jones filed a pro se motion to vacate his conviction under Section 2255, arguing his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights were violated. He blamed his counsel as ineffective. Jones also blamed the sheriff's office that approved his gun license for, he argued, making him believe that his felonies had been expunged at the time he bought his handgun.
The form he submitted contained a warning: "If you fail to set forth all the grounds in this motion, you may be barred from presenting additional grounds at a later date."
But one ground Jones did leave out: that not knowing his felon status potentially made him innocent of the federal felon-in-possession statute. Jones thought it was pointless to raise the issue in the motion, considering that no U.S. circuit court at the time, including the one where he was tried, interpreted the statute as requiring knowledge of felon status, Ortiz said.
The omission of that claim in his original motion to vacate precluded Jones from raising it again in later habeas actions, a fact that became crucial to his case.
The district court denied the motion in January 2003. Jones made two more unsuccessful attempts, in December 2006 and June 2017, to vacate his conviction using motions. Then, between 2005 and 2019, while serving his sentence in various federal prisons across the country, Jones made eight attempts to use a traditional writ of habeas corpus. All of them failed. His latest habeas petition, however, gained momentum after the Eastern District of Arkansas denied it and the Eighth Circuit dismissed it on jurisdictional grounds.
In its order, the Eighth Circuit said Jones should have raised the felon status knowledge issue in his first Section 2255 motion despite the long odds.
"They really closed the door," Blume said. "A lot of other circuits would say: 'Well, you're lucky. We're not going to fault you for this because the law was clearly against you at the time.'"
Blume, Hafetz and Garrett are among a group of scholars who filed an amicus brief in support of Jones in July. The National Association of Federal Defenders told the Supreme Court in a brief that adopting the Eighth Circuit's position would bar prisoners' access to habeas even where it's clear that they are detained for conduct that Congress did not make criminal.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union also filed a joint amicus brief supporting Jones, arguing that the text of the savings clause in Section 2255 makes clear that federal prisoners may seek habeas relief when they cannot challenge the legality of their detention through motions to vacate.
Briefs filed to support Hendrix argue Jones should not be entitled to habeas review because he didn't show that the Section 2255 motion process was inadequate to address his claims.
Blume said that the Supreme Court ruling in the case will likely fall into one of three scenarios. It could dismiss Jones' habeas petition if justices agree with Hendrix the evidence is overwhelming that Jones committed a crime; it could embrace Jones' view that the habeas writ under Section 2241 is intended to address the type of claims he raised when Section 2255 motions are not viable. Or it could endorse the U.S. government's view and shut down that avenue for using habeas corpus.
"This is one of those in which anything could happen," Blume said. However, he said, in about 72% of the cases it decides to hear, the Supreme Court ends up siding with the petitioner.
--Editing by Robert Rudinger.