620
Opinion of the Court
to those cases which have become final before the new rules are announced," id., at 310, unless the new rule "places 'certain kinds of primary, private individual conduct beyond the power of the criminal law-making authority to proscribe,' " id., at 311 (quoting Mackey v. United States, 401 U. S. 667, 692 (1971) (Harlan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part)), or could be considered a "watershed rul[e] of criminal procedure," 489 U. S., at 311. But we do not believe that Teague governs this case. The only constitutional claim made here is that petitioner's guilty plea was not knowing and intelligent. There is surely nothing new about this principle, enumerated as long ago as Smith v. O'Grady, supra. And because Teague by its terms applies only to procedural rules, we think it is inapplicable to the situation in which this Court decides the meaning of a criminal statute enacted by Congress.
This distinction between substance and procedure is an important one in the habeas context. The Teague doctrine is founded on the notion that one of the "principal functions of habeas corpus [is] 'to assure that no man has been incarcerated under a procedure which creates an impermissibly large risk that the innocent will be convicted.' " 489 U. S., at 312 (quoting Desist v. United States, 394 U. S. 244, 262 (1969)). Consequently, unless a new rule of criminal procedure is of such a nature that "without [it] the likelihood of an accurate conviction is seriously diminished," 489 U. S., at 313, there is no reason to apply the rule retroactively on habeas review. By contrast, decisions of this Court holding that a substantive federal criminal statute does not reach certain conduct, like decisions placing conduct " 'beyond the power of the criminal law-making authority to proscribe,' " id., at 311 (quoting Mackey, supra, at 692), necessarily carry a significant risk that a defendant stands convicted of "an act that the law does not make criminal." Davis v. United States, 417 U. S. 333, 346 (1974). For under our federal system it is
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