Yesterday, in Jones v. Hendrix, the United States Supreme Court made it even more difficult for innocent people to overturn their convictions and be freed from incarceration for crimes they did not commit.
At Texas Defender Service, we know first-hand that the criminal-legal system makes mistakes. Many of our clients have compelling claims of innocence. Their cases are filled with flawed DNA evidence, unreliable eyewitness testimony, and sloppy police work.
Wrongful conviction is endemic to our injustice system. Studies estimate that about 4-6% of people who are incarcerated are innocent.
With almost two million people in our prisons and jails, that means that tens of thousands of incarcerated people were wrongfully convicted.
People with compelling innocence claims should be granted every opportunity to present those claims in court. But the reality is that many wrongfully convicted people are never relieved of their illegal convictions and remain imprisoned despite their innocence.
And the United States Supreme Court just slammed another door shut for innocent people seeking justice. Under the Court’s ruling, some people who are completely innocent will be barred from ever seeking relief in federal court and must serve their entire, illegal sentence.
Our Manne Family Fellow, Diego Galeazzi, wanted to unpack the U.S. Supreme Court majority’s decision. Check out Diego’s summary below for more about the Jones decision and why it contradicts justice and truth.
With gratitude,
Burke Butler Executive Director Texas Defender Service
Jones v. Hendrix
by Diego Galeazzi, Manne Family Fellow
On June 22, 2023, the Supreme Court erected yet another barrier to innocent people obtaining relief from their wrongful convictions in federal court.
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In 2000, Marcus DeAngelo Jones was convicted and sentenced for three counts of firearm offenses. After exhausting his direct appeals, Jones filed for habeas corpus relief in federal court and had one of his sentences vacated but the other sentences affirmed.
More than a decade after his federal habeas proceeding had concluded, the Supreme Court decided a case reinterpreting the federal law under which Jones received his convictions. Under that decision, Jones would not have received one of his convictions.
When Jones sought to file a second habeas petition in federal court alleging that the change in statutory interpretation meant he was serving an illegal sentence, he was told that AEDPA, the federal habeas statute, didn’t authorize him to bring his claim in another petition.
And now, the Supreme Court agreed that AEDPA precluded Jones from seeking relief. In Jones v. Hendrix, the Court held that federal prisoners like Jones are barred from presenting claims of actual innocence – even if everyone now agrees they were legally ineligible to be convicted– if they had previously sought federal post-conviction relief from that conviction.
In other words, an incarcerated federal prisoner, with a claim of legal innocence, is left without recourse just because they had sought federal post-conviction relief before.In layperson’s terms, the Supreme Court ruled that Jones will have to serve his entire prison sentence even though he is locked up for conduct that is not a crime.
As Justices Sotomayor and Kagan wrote in dissent, such a decision “yields disturbing results.” The dissenters wrote: “It does not matter that an intervening decision of this Court confirms his innocence. By challenging his conviction once before, he forfeited his freedom.”
In her separate dissent, Justice Jackson emphasized that she is “deeply troubled” by the constitutional implications of the majority’s approach “with respect to the incarceration of potential legal innocents.”
As she explained, whether an incarcerated person is “legally innocent or not,” under the Court’s interpretation, “no path exists” for a federal judge to ever consider their innocence, “forever slamming the courtroom doors to a possibly innocent person who has never had a meaningful opportunity to get a new and retroactively applicable claim for release reviewed on the merits …” Justice Jackson concluded her dissent with an apt view of the Court’s recent habeas corpus decisions:
Today’s ruling follows a recent series of troubling AEDPA interpretations. All of these opinions have now collectively managed to transform a statute that Congress designed to provide for a rational and orderly process of federal postconviction judicial review into an aimless and chaotic exercise in futility. The route to obtaining collateral relief is presently replete with imagined artificial barriers, arbitrary dead ends, and traps for the unwary.