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Blackmun, J., dissenting
than Hill-Timmreck to determine whether a violation of that law warrants federal court review and enforcement.6
The difference in the roles that federal statutes play in state and federal criminal proceedings points to another danger attendant to the uncritical application of the Hill standard in § 2254. Hill has been read to disfavor habeas review of federal statutory violations as a class. See, e. g., ante, at 356 (concurring opinion) (reading Hill for the proposition that "[m]ost statutory violations . . . are simply not important enough to invoke the extraordinary habeas jurisdiction"). This distinction between statutory and constitutional violations, exaggerated even in the context of § 2255,7 has even less justification under § 2254.
6 There is an additional reason to question the application of the Hill-Timmreck "fundamental error" or "miscarriage of justice" standard to Reed's § 2254 claim. In both Hill and Timmreck, a federal prisoner bypassed an available federal appeal, and this Court endorsed the rule of Sunal v. Large, 332 U. S. 174, 178 (1947), that collateral attack cannot "do service for an appeal." See Hill, 368 U. S., at 428-429 (finding "apposite" the reasoning in Sunal, 332 U. S., at 178, that " '[w]ise judicial administration of the federal courts' " counseled against permitting a collateral attack to supplant appeals); Timmreck, 441 U. S., at 784 (seeing "no basis here for allowing collateral attack 'to do service for an appeal' ") (quoting Sunal, 332 U. S., at 178); see also Hill, 368 U. S., at 428-429 (noting that Congress " 'provided a regular, orderly method for correction' " of errors by " 'granting an appeal to the Circuit Court of Appeals and by vesting us with certiorari jurisdiction' " and that if defendants were permitted to bypass this orderly method, " '[e]rror which was not deemed sufficiently adequate to warrant an appeal would acquire new implications' ") (quoting Sunal, 332 U. S., at 181-182). Thus, this standard appears to have been based in part on principles of default. Our habeas jurisprudence subsequently has imposed a procedural default bar in § 2254 cases, Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U. S. 72, 84, 87 (1977), and that bar was not applied to Reed.
7 Hill and Timmreck can be read for the proposition that at least some nonconstitutional violations "are simply not important enough" to warrant habeas relief. In Hill, for example, a federal prisoner who did not appeal his conviction was not permitted to obtain collateral relief based on the sentencing court's "failure to comply with the formal requirements" of
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