She added that the majority “tiptoes around what Jones is actually arguing” - legal innocence - by using euphemisms and obscuring language. There “is simply no justification” for the court’s conclusions, not under the letter of the law, nor as a matter of policy and real-world outcomes, Jackson said. In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson methodically parsed the majority's analysis and its underlying reasoning - and ultimately came up empty-handed. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote in dissent that the ruling blocks a “prisoner who is actually innocent” from raising that claim “merely because he previously sought postconviction relief." "It's also just one example of the increasing hostility this court has to all forms of postconviction relief," Ortiz added.
Department of Justice didn't respond to requests for comment.ĭaniel Ortiz, Jones' attorney in the case, told me the court's decision leaves "no way out" for people imprisoned for actions that are later declared not to be a crime. The justices said the “inadequate or ineffective” exception applies only in exceedingly rare circumstances, like if the sentencing court were to be dissolved by Congress, for example. The statute barred “second or successive” motions to vacate, but included exceptions for newly discovered evidence, new rules of constitutional law, and if the earlier appeal was “inadequate or ineffective to test the legality” of the sentence - a clear catch-all provision for situations where there is a manifest injustice.īut in Jones' case, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that he couldn't raise his innocence claim because he had filed an earlier, separate motion to vacate, based on ineffective assistance of counsel, rather than arguing that he is legally innocent.
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Still, lawmakers made clear that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act would not go as far as to abolish procedures for people who have evidence of innocence that they could not have presented at trial for some reason. That notion is reflected in the legal concept of “finality” – the idea that convictions and sentences should become irrevocable at some point. Prisoners' rights to file a motion to vacate or correct their sentences were severely curtailed by Congress in 1996 in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, as lawmakers raised unfounded concerns about prisoners endlessly appealing their convictions. Jones argued that he was entitled to a chance to prove that he didn’t actually know he had a felony on his record, because he believed his prior conviction would be expunged under the terms of his plea agreement, according to court documents.
The court held years later, in 2019, that the language of the statute requires prosecutors to prove the person knew they had a felony when they had the gun. The Supreme Court's June 22 decision came in a different post-conviction appeal by Marcus DeAngelo Jones, who was convicted in Missouri in 2000 of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. That man, Barry Jones, was released from death row two weeks ago, after Arizona’s attorney general agreed with several lower court judges and the Supreme Court’s liberals that his conviction could not stand.Īrizona's Federal Public Defender’s office announced Jones’ release on June 15, saying “the need to correct an unjust conviction remained,” even though the Supreme Court’s May 2022 decision left a man on death row for a crime he didn't commit, and “shut the courthouse doors” to many others. Last year, for example, the court held that a man convicted of murder in Arizona was barred from presenting new medical evidence of his innocence on appeal, effectively clearing the way for his execution.
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The June 22 ruling is the latest in a series of recent decisions by the court’s conservative majority that have systematically closed off legal avenues to challenge convictions, even for innocent people facing death sentences. Supreme Court held last week that a federal prisoner cannot challenge a sentence even if subsequent rulings show that courts misinterpreted the law and convicted the person for conduct that wasn’t actually a crime.
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