Jackson, J., dissenting
precedent, legal innocence claims fit that category. See Davis, 417 U. S., at 346 (“There can be no room for doubt” that “conviction and punishment … for an act that the law does not make criminal” “ ‘inherently results in a complete miscarriage of justice’ ”); see also Bousley v. United States, 523 U. S. 614, 623–624 (1998).
These background principles relate to the successive petition that Jones seeks to bring here as follows. If the majority is right that (by virtue of §2255(h)) prisoners like Jones are now unable to bring a successive §2255 petition to make the same kind of legal innocence claim that they could have brought prior to AEDPA, then Congress’s enactment of §2255(h) has dramatically altered the legal landscape in a manner that seems, at best, inconsistent with its original intent. To repeat: The saving clause expresses a congressional intent to maintain equivalence between what a prisoner could claim before and after §2255(h); yet under the majority’s reading, §2255(h)’s “second or successive” bar would effectively operate to preclude successive legal innocence claims—shrinking the universe of previously available claims—the opposite of what Congress set out to do when it set up §2255.
In my view, that is where the saving clause comes in. Reading the saving clause to perform its normal, intended function of “saving” previously available claims solves this problem, because it allows prisoners who could have brought a claim prior to the enactment of AEDPA (like Jones) to file a habeas petition to the extent that §2255 now precludes such a filing under that particular statutory mechanism. Thus, interpreting §2255(e)’s “inadequate and ineffective” language to permit the filing of a habeas petition that raises a legal innocence claim in these circumstances seems perfectly consistent with Congress’s intent.
This understanding of the saving clause also explains the clause’s application—or, more precisely, its inapplicability—to the types of claims specifically mentioned in
