Justices questioned the government's reading of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which several criticized as strained.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Congress must be clear if it wants to chip away at the "very broad jurisdictional grant" that the high court enjoys.
"The reason for a clear statement rule, or a clear indication, is that the underlying constitutional question is one that we haven't had to squarely answer for 236 years," Justice Brett Kavanaugh later added.
The case, Michael Bowe v. United States
, centers on whether people incarcerated in federal prisons can mount repeated challenges to their convictions and sentences under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.The act bars repeat habeas corpus applications from people incarcerated in state facilities in most circumstances, but appellate courts are split on whether the prohibition also applies to people incarcerated in federal prisons and motions to vacate convictions.
However, the wording of the law also raises a second question over whether the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction over the appellate courts' decisions to grant or deny permission to file second or successive applications.
In Bowe's case, the Eleventh Circuit decided Bowe's repeated motions to vacate his conviction were barred under the act. The Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth circuits have made similar findings, but the Fourth, Sixth and Ninth circuits have ruled to the contrary.
The act also says that appellate court rulings granting or denying a request to file a second or successive application "shall not be appealable and shall not be the subject of a petition for rehearing or for a writ of certiorari." This raises the second question of whether the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction over appellate courts' decisions in cases like Bowe's.
Bowe contends that the act's repeat-petition ban applies only to habeas corpus applications from people incarcerated in state prisons — not to people incarcerated in federal ones, and not to motions to vacate. He also argues that the high court has jurisdiction over his case.
Bowe pled guilty in 2009 to attempting to rob an armored car outside a Florida bank and was sentenced to 24 years in prison. Since then, he has repeatedly sought to challenge his conviction on one of the counts — discharging a firearm during a commission of a crime of violence — following U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have refined the definition of a crime of violence.
He filed a motion to vacate his conviction in 2016, which the district court denied. In 2019, he sought permission from the Eleventh Circuit to file another motion to vacate his conviction on the charge, but the appellate court denied his request, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for certiorari.
In 2022, after the high court held in United States v. Taylor
that a Hobbs Act robbery is not a violent crime for the purposes of the gun charge, Bowe again sought permission from the Eleventh Circuit. But the appellate court dismissed his request, saying AEDPA barred his latest attempt.He filed a new petition for certiorari in August 2024, which the high court accepted.
On Tuesday, justices heard about 90 minutes of detailed, technical arguments in the case from attorneys for Bowe and the government, as well as court-appointed amicus counsel arguing in support of the Eleventh Circuit's decision.
Bowe's attorney, federal public defender Andrew Adler, suggested that the justices could take a narrower approach to the jurisdictional question by finding that the Eleventh Circuit did not trigger the statute's provision on appealability because it did not grant nor deny Bowe's application, but instead dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction.
"We don't have a particular dog in the fight on how the court resolves its own jurisdiction here," he said. "And that's why I keep coming back to our narrower arguments, because, to the extent that anyone is concerned about the implications for this, the narrower arguments would avoid that."
Government attorney Anthony Yang, assistant to the solicitor general, told the court that the Eleventh Circuit's dismissal "is quite literally a denial of [Bowe's] request," and that the high court lacked jurisdiction. Justices cut him off several times as he spoke.
Yang said he believed the statute's language was clear enough to define a jurisdictional boundary for the court, and began to describe the "contextual point" that the 30-day deadline for challenges that Congress included in the statute does not allow enough time to petition for a writ of certiorari.
"Mr. Yang," Justice Elena Kagan interjected, "that might be a good argument, but it's not the kind of argument that you can make if there's a clear statement rule."
In one exchange, Justice Kavanaugh pressed Yang on whether lower courts would even have to follow the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the statute if the high court lacked jurisdiction.
Yang said, "I would think it would be a pretty willful lower court that —"
"Well," Justice Kavanaugh interrupted. "What would we do if they didn't?"
Yang suggested the possibility of having the matter addressed "sua sponte en banc," which did not seem to sway Justice Kavanaugh.
"The only point I was making is that it seems pretty cute to kind of have a collateral dicta and expect everyone to follow that when we're openly saying, under your view, 'no jurisdiction,'" the justice said.
Amicus curiae Kasdin Mitchell of Kirkland & Ellis LLP, arguing in favor of the Eleventh Circuit's opinion, told the court that Congress passed AEDPA on the one-year anniversary of Timothy McVeigh's bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City "to advance the finality of criminal convictions."
"There is no reason to think that in the landmark legislation passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, in which Congress was trying to focus on finality, it entirely eliminated any do-over bar on post-conviction motions by federal prisoners like McVeigh," she said.
Andrew Adler of the Federal Public Defender's Office argued for Bowe.
Kasdin Mitchell of Kirkland Ellis LLP argued for the lower court's decision.
Anthony Yang of the Office of the U.S. Solicitor General argued for the government.
The case is Michael Bowe v. United States, case number 24-5438, in the Supreme Court of the United States.
--Additional reporting by Katie Buehler and Rachel Scharf. Editing by Alanna Weissman.