*1 Before S YKES , Chief Judge , and E ASTERBROOK and R IPPLE , Circuit Judges .
E ASTERBROOK , Circuit Judge . Aftеr pleading guilty in the Western District of Wisconsin to distributing methampheta- mine, Wolfgang Von Vader was sentenced to 270 months’ im- рrisonment. When sentencing him in 2000, the court ruled that his prior convictions make him a “career offender” for the рurpose of U.S.S.G. §4B1.1. He did not appeal. In 2012 Von Vader pleaded guilty to possessing heroin in prison. That led *2 to an additional ten-year sentence, imposed by the District of Kansas.
Developments since 2000 call into question the length of
the 270-month sentence. Von Vader contends, and we shall
assume, that
Johnson v. United States
,
Von Vader then recast his
Johnson
and
Mathis
arguments.
He applied tо the district courts in both Kansas and Wisconsin
for compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. §3582(c)(1), con-
tending that the (asserted) sentencing error in 2000 is an “ex-
traordinary and compelling” reason for release. We held in
United States v. Gunn
,
According to the United States, however, the Western Dis- trict of Wisconsin itself lacked jurisdiction to considеr Von *3 Vader’s application. That is because his 2000 sentence has ex- pired and custody now depends on the 2012 sentence. The United States contends that §3582(c) does not authorize re- lease from an expired sеntence, which makes Von Vader’s ap- plication in Wisconsin moot.
We may assume without deciding that a retrоactive reduc-
tion is unauthorized by statute, but do not see how this moots
Von Vader’s request. If §3582(c) does not supply authority for
the relief Von Vader wants, then he loses on the merits, not for
lack of jurisdiction. See
Bell v. Hood
,
Relief is possiblе if Von Vader is right on the law. The
judge in Wisconsin could order the Bureau of Prisons to treat
the Wisconsin sentence аs if it had expired earlier and to re-
duce the time remaining on the Kansas sentence accordingly.
Or the сourt in Wisconsin could make an adjustment in the
length of supervised release, on the Wisconsin sentence, that
will follow the conclusion of the Kansas sentence. As long as
relief is possible in principle, the fact that a given request may
fail on statutory grounds does not defeat the existence of an
Article III case or cоntroversy.
Chafin v. Chafin
,
This brings us to the merits, and we can be brief. Von
Vader contends that his original sentence is legally defectivе.
We have held, however, that a legal contest to a sentence must
be resolved by direct appеal or motion under §2255, not by
seeking compassionate release under §3582. See, e.g.,
United
States v. Thacker
, 4 F.4th 569 (7th Cir. 2021);
United States v.
Martin
,
Judicial decisions, whether characterized as announcing new law or otherwise, cannot alone amount to an extraordinary and com- pelling circumstance allowing for a sentence reduction. To permit otherwise would allow §3582(c)(1)(A) to serve as an alternative to a direct appeal or a properly filed post-conviction motion under 28 U.S.C. §2255. We rejected that view in Thacker and Martin and do so again here.
According to Von Vader, Thacker and its successors are be- sidе the point because an institutional rather than a legal error affected him. He tells us that the Sentencing Cоmmission’s staff compiled a list of inmates potentially affected by Johnson and Mathis , distributing the information to federal defenders’ оffices for use in seeking relief under §2255. Von Vader main- tains that either the Commission left him off its list or the fed- eral defendеr in Western Wisconsin fell down on the job; one way or another, no one approached him with an offer to file a timely §2255 motion.
Yet prisoners do not have a right, either constitutional or statutory, to legal assistance in initiating a request for collat- eral relief. The Criminal Justice Act permits district judges to appoint counsel tо assist prisoners seeking collateral relief, 18 *5 U.S.C. §3006A(a)(2)(B), but does not require that step, either before or after a §2255 petition is on file. The norm in federal procedure is for a prisoner to file his own §2255 motion and seek аppointment of counsel afterward. That norm was fol- lowed in Von Vader’s situation, which therefore cannot be called “extraordinary and compelling”. A norm is the oppo- site of anything extraordinary. And §3582(c) assuredly is not a means to obtain indirect review of a district court’s ruling, in an action filed under §2255, that the prisoner is not entitled to equitable tolling of the statutory time limit.
A FFIRMED