Page:Jones v. Hendrix.pdf/51

Rh brings a claim that arose after the time in which the prisoner would or could have filed his first petition. Ibid. (authorizing successive petitions raising “newly discovered evidence” or “a new rule of constitutional law” (emphasis added)).

In light of this key observation, the majority’s assumption that §2255(h) bars Jones’s claim is significantly hobbled. Jones’s statutory innocence claim is also “new”—in the sense that it was not available to him when his first §2255 petition was filed. And Jones’s claim shares other features of the circumstances that Congress exempted from the “second or successive” general prohibition as well—including that it implicates innocence, see §2255(h)(1), and stems from a retroactively applicable Supreme Court opinion, see §2255(h)(2). Nor does the filing of Jones’s successive petition implicate any anti-claim-splitting rationale, as Jones did not manipulatively withhold his legal innocence claim during his initial §2255 proceedings. Indeed, he could not possibly have done so, since this Court did not decide Rehaif v. United States, 588 U. S. ___ (2019), which provided the basis for his claim, until nearly two decades after Jones filed his first petition.

In short, it is hard to believe that a Congress that expressly authorized “new” claims involving innocence or those that arise from developments in Supreme Court case {{rule|5em|align=left}{{smallrefs}}