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Cite as: 599 U. S. ____ (2023)
21

Jackson, J., dissenting

seems to have “ ‘lost sight of the fact that’ ” federally incarcerated individuals “ ‘can raise federal statutory claims in their collateral attacks.’ ” Chazen, 938 F. 3d, at 863 (quoting Hart & Wechsler 1362; emphasis added); Chazen, 938 F. 3d, at 863 (suggesting that the omission of legal innocence claims from §2255(h) was due to “congressional oversight”); Reply Brief for Respondent 15.

To me, this contextual revelation rocks the foundation of the majority’s negative inference. That is, it is plausible (and perhaps even likely) that Congress did not appreciate fully that the modeled-after language establishing a successive-petition bar did not capture the full scope of available claims for federal prisoners.[1] And, of course, if Congress simply overlooked statutory innocence claims when it crafted §2255(h), then the omitted language that the majority puts so much stock in is not actually indicative of Congress having “chosen finality” with respect to statutory innocence claims. Ante, at 12. Instead, the absence of any textual reference to statutory innocence would be wholly unremarkable.

3

Given the purpose and history of §2255(h) as I have just described them, I find quite compelling the Government’s observation that “[n]othing in AEDPA [actually] justifies an


  1. The rushed and emotionally charged manner in which AEDPA came into fruition makes Congress’s lack of attention to this detail a very realistic possibility. AEDPA was passed in reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing, and President Clinton had “demand[ed]” its passage by the 1-year anniversary of that event. J. Liebman, An “Effective Death Penalty”? AEDPA and Error Detection in Capital Cases, 67 Brooklyn L. Rev. 411, 413 (2011); see also Stevenson, 77 N. Y. U. L. Rev., at 701. Both this Court and commentators have observed that, likely as a result, AEDPA is “shoddily crafted and poorly cohered.” L. Kovarsky, Death Ineligibility and Habeas Corpus, 95 Cornell L. Rev. 329, 342 (2010); see also Lindh v. Murphy, 521 U. S. 320, 336 (1997) (“[I]n a world of silk purses and pigs’ ears, [AEDPA] is not a silk purse of the art of statutory drafting”).