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Page Number: 50.0

18 

JONES v. HENDRIX 

JACKSON, J., dissenting 

was “essentially giving one bite out of the apple to drasti-
cally reduce the ability to have successive petitions unless 
there is some egregious action that is learned about after 
the petition is filed, the first petition.”  Id., at 15027.7 

Thus,  Congress  enacted  §2255(h)  to  prevent  prisoners
from  engaging  in  manipulative  filing  practices—such  as 
claim  splitting,  i.e.,  the  inefficient  business  of  prisoners 
with time on their hands doling out their existing postcon-
viction claims in a series of successive motions filed in court 
seriatim.  See Sanders, 373 U. S., at 18 (noting that a pris-
oner  may 
“deliberately 
“deliberately  withhol[d]”  or 
abando[n]” claims in a first postconviction petition “in the 
hope of being granted two hearings rather than one”).8  And, 
tellingly, because Congress was focused on that problem—
not  attempting  to  impose  “finality”  writ  large—it  did  not
bar all successive petitions; to the contrary, it proceeded to
identify  particular  circumstances  in  which  another  collat-
eral challenge would be authorized.  §§2255(h)(1)–(2). 

Additional doubts about the majority’s negative inference
surface  when  one  recognizes  that  the  two  circumstances 
Congress carved out of the successive-petition bar share an 
important  common  thread:  Both  situations  relate  to  the 
newness of the claim that the prisoner seeks to assert in a 
successive petition.  That is, both prongs of §2255(h) that 
authorize  a  successive  petition  do  so  where  a  petitioner 

—————— 

7 See also H. R. Rep. No. 101–681, pt. 1, p. 111 (1990) (explaining that
the  purpose  of  a  predecessor  bill  was  “to  promote  finality”  but  also  “to 
ensure that habeas corpus petitioners have one fair opportunity to pre-
sent their Federal claims to the Federal courts”). 

8 It appears that, in enacting restrictions on successive petitions, Con-
gress was primarily worried about successive petitions filed by state pris-
oners  on  death  row,  because  a  petition  could  delay  the  execution  of  a 
death sentence.  See Stevenson, 77 N. Y. U. L. Rev., at 723–730.  Indeed, 
the law is called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.  That 
concern does not apply to a situation like Jones’s, since he is not serving 
a death sentence, and nothing about a successive petition delays the ex-
ecution of his sentence of imprisonment.