346
Scalia, J., dissenting
the merits, and (3) the ends of justice would not be served by reaching the merits of the subsequent application." Id., at 15. Thus, there appeared for the first time in our decisions the notion that a habeas court has "the duty" to reach the merits of a subsequent petition "if the ends of justice demand," id., at 18-19—and it appeared for the perfectly good reason that the statute, as then written, imposed such a duty. And even as to that duty the Sanders Court added a "final qualification" that the Court today would do well to remember:
"The principles governing . . . denial of a hearing on a successive application are addressed to the sound discretion of the federal trial judges. Theirs is the major responsibility for the just and sound administration of the federal collateral remedies, and theirs must be the judgment as to whether a second or successive application shall be denied without consideration of the merits." Id., at 18.
Three years after Sanders, however, Congress amended § 2244 to establish different finality rules for federal prisoner petitions (filed under § 2255) and state prisoner petitions (filed under § 2254). Section 2244(a), which addresses petitions by federal prisoners, retains the "ends of justice" proviso from the old statute; but § 2244(b) omits it, thus restricting the district courts' obligation to entertain petitions by state prisoners to cases where the petition is neither successive nor abusive. One might have expected that this notso-subtle change in the statute would change our interpretation of it, and that we would modify Sanders by holding that a district court could exercise its discretion to give controlling weight to the prior denial—which was of course precisely what Salinger envisioned.
Yet when the new version of § 2244(b) was first construed, in Kuhlmann v. Wilson, 477 U. S. 436 (1986), a plurality of the Court announced that it would "continue to rely on the
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