Cite as: 505 U. S. 333 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
We have previously held that even if a state prisoner cannot meet the cause and prejudice standard, a federal court may hear the merits of the successive claims if the failure to hear the claims would constitute a "miscarriage of justice." In a trio of 1986 decisions, we elaborated on the miscarriage of justice, or "actual innocence," exception. As we explained in Kuhlmann v. Wilson, supra, the exception developed from the language of the federal habeas statute, which, prior to 1966, allowed successive claims to be denied without a hearing if the judge were "satisfied that the ends of justice will not be served by such inquiry." Id., at 448. We held that despite the removal of this statutory language from 28 U. S. C. § 2244(b) in 1966, the miscarriage of justice exception would allow successive claims to be heard if the petitioner "establish[es] that under the probative evidence he has a colorable claim of factual innocence." Kuhlmann, supra, at 454.5 In the second of these cases we held that the actual innocence exception also applies to procedurally defaulted claims. Murray v. Carrier, supra.6
In Smith v. Murray, 477 U. S. 527 (1986), we found no miscarriage of justice in the failure to examine the merits of procedurally defaulted claims in the capital sentencing context. We emphasized that the miscarriage of justice exception is concerned with actual as compared to legal innocence,
5 Our standard for determining actual innocence was articulated in Kuhlmann as: "[T]he prisoner must 'show a fair probability that, in light of all the evidence, including that alleged to have been illegally admitted (but with due regard to any unreliability of it) and evidence tenably claimed to have been wrongly excluded or to have become available only after the trial, the trier of the facts would have entertained a reasonable doubt of his guilt.' " 477 U. S., at 455, n. 17, quoting Friendly, Is Innocence Irrelevant? Collateral Attack on Criminal Judgments, 38 U. Chi. L. Rev. 142, 160 (1970).
6 We stated that the merits of a defaulted claim could be reached "in an extraordinary case, where a constitutional violation has probably resulted in the conviction of one who is actually innocent . . . ." Murray v. Carrier, 477 U. S., at 496.
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