Summary
U. S. Supreme Court case in which a habitual felon who illegally possessed a gun sought to make one more challenge to his conviction, after multiple challenges have been rejected over 20 years. Career criminal Marcus Jones had been convicted of 11 prior felonies in 1999 when he bought a gun at a pawnshop and lied about his priors. The circumstances leave little doubt that he knew he could not legally buy a gun, but the jury was not instructed to make that specific finding because the law was not understood to require it at the time. Jones filed one unsuccessful challenge after another for 20 years until the Supreme Court changed the interpretation of the federal statute to require knowledge of the condition that made purchase and possession illegal. In 1996, Congress sharply limited the circumstances in which a convict can make repeated challenges to a criminal judgment under 28 U.S.C § 2255. A clear case of actual innocence is one of the exceptions allowing a repeat attack, but Jones does not qualify for that exception. He now claims that the 1996 act does not really preclude challenges such as his but merely requires that convicts revert to an earlier procedure in a different court. That is, he claims he can file a habeas corpus petition instead of a motion under the law that replaced habeas corpus for these kinds of collateral challenges by federal prisoners. He further claims that the 1996 act would be unconstitutional if it really cut off challenges such as his, despite a Supreme Court opinion the same year that rejected that argument for state prisoners. CJLF had entered the case to argue that there is no real constitutional issue here, and Congress's limit on repeated attack on criminal judgments should be enforced as it was intended. The Supreme Court agreed.
