The judges questioned the government's reading of the anti-terrorism and effective death penalty law, which many criticized as strained.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Congress must be clear if it wants to chip away at the “very broad jurisdictional power” enjoyed by the high court.
“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 clearly answer in 236 years,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh later added.
The case, Michael Bowe v. United States 
focuses on the question of whether people in federal prisons can repeatedly challenge their convictions and sentences under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.
The law in most cases prohibits repeating habeas corpus petitions of people incarcerated in state facilities, but appeals courts are divided on whether the ban also applies to people incarcerated in federal prisons and to petitions to vacate convictions.
However, the language of the statute also raises a second question: whether the United States Supreme Court has jurisdiction over appellate court decisions to grant or deny leave to file a second or successive petitions.
In Bowe's case, the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Bowe's repeated motions to vacate his conviction were barred under the law. The Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits reached similar conclusions, but the Fourth, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits ruled otherwise.
The law also provides that decisions of courts of appeal granting or denying a request to file a second or successive petition “shall not be appealed and shall not be subject to a petition for rehearing or for a writ of certiorari.” This raises the second question of whether the United States Supreme Court has jurisdiction over appellate court decisions in cases like Bowe's.
Bowe argues that the law's ban on repeated petitions applies only to habeas corpus petitions from people incarcerated in state prisons — not to people incarcerated in federal prisons, nor to motions for release. He also claims that the High Court has jurisdiction over his case.
Bowe pleaded guilty in 2009 to attempted robbery of an armored vehicle outside a Florida bank and was sentenced to 24 years in prison. Since then, he has repeatedly attempted to challenge his conviction on one of the counts — discharging a firearm during the commission of a crime of violence — following U.S. Supreme Court rulings that 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 asked the Eleventh Circuit for permission to file another petition to vacate his conviction on that charge, but the appeals court denied his request and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for certiorari.
In 2022, after the decision of the High Court of United States v. Taylor That a robbery under the Hobbs Act is not a violent crime for purposes of the gun charge, Bowe again sought permission from the Eleventh Circuit. But the appeals court rejected his request, saying AEDPA had barred his latest attempt.
He filed a new petition for certiorari in August 2024, which the High Court granted.
On Tuesday, the justices heard about 90 minutes of detailed technical arguments in the case, presented by lawyers for Bowe and the government, as well as court-appointed amicus attorneys arguing in favor of the Eleventh Circuit's decision.
Bowe's lawyer, federal public defender Andrew Adler, suggested the justices might take a narrower approach to the jurisdictional question by holding that the Eleventh Circuit did not trigger the statute's appellate provision because it neither granted nor denied Bowe's request, but instead dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction.
“We don't have a particular dog in the fight over how the court will determine 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 worried about the implications of that, the narrower arguments would avoid that.”
Government attorney Anthony Yang, assistant solicitor general, told the court that the Eleventh Circuit's dismissal “is literally a denial of (Bowe's) request” and that the high court lacked jurisdiction. The judges interrupted him several times while he was speaking.
Yang said he believed the statute's language was clear enough to define a jurisdictional limit for the court, and began describing the “contextual point” that the 30-day deadline for challenges that Congress included in the statute does not allow sufficient time to seek a writ of certiorari.
“Mr. Yang,” Justice Elena Kagan interjected, “that might be a good argument, but it's not the kind of argument you can make if there is a clear reporting rule.”
In one exchange, Justice Kavanaugh asked Yang whether lower courts should even follow the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the law if the high court lacked jurisdiction.
Yang said: “I think it would be a pretty willing lower court that…”
“Well,” Judge Kavanaugh interrupted. “What would we do if they didn’t?”
Yang suggested the possibility of handling the case “sua sponte en banc,” which did not appear to sway Justice Kavanaugh.
“The only point I was making is that it seems kind of cute to have some sort of collateral dicta and expect everyone to follow it when we're openly saying, in your opinion, 'no jurisdiction,'” the judge said.
Amicus curiae Kasdin Mitchell Kirkland & Ellis LLParguing in favor of the Eleventh Circuit's opinion, told the court that Congress passed the 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 believe that in the landmark legislation passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, in which Congress was trying to focus on finality, it completely eliminated any restrictions on post-conviction petitions for federal prisoners like McVeigh,” she said.
Andrew Adler, of the Federal Public Defender's Office, defended Bowe.
Kasdin Mitchell of Kirkland Ellis LLP argued in favor of the lower court's decision.
Anthony Yang of the U.S. Solicitor General's Office argued for the government.
The case is Michael Bowe v. United States, case number 24-5438in the Supreme Court of the United States.
–Additional reporting by Katie Buehler and Rachel Scharf. Edited by Alanna Weissman.
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