Whether non-capital habeas corpus petitioners in the Eleventh Circuit are being treated so fundamentally differently than similarly situated prisoners in other circuits that they are effectively being denied due process, fair punishment, and their right of access to the courts

QUESTION PRESENTED Phillip Tomlin’s sentence of life imprisonment without parole reflects a breakdown of the Certificate of Appealability (“COA”) review process and raises a pressing matter of national importance: whether non-capital habeas corpus petitioners in the Eleventh Circuit are being treated so fundamentally differently than similarly situated prisoners in other circuits that they are effectively being denied due process, fair punishment, and their right of access to the courts. Specifically, did the Eleventh Circuit impose an improper, too demanding, and unduly burdensome COA standard that contravenes this Court’s precedents, deepens a circuit split in the COA standard in non-capital cases, and is deeply arbitrary, when it denied Mr. Tomlin a COA on a legal question that it had explicitly left open a few years earlier and that involves a hair-splitting difference from a 2011 decision of the Eleventh Circuit in Magwood v. Warden, 664 F.3d 1340 (11th Cir. 2011) holding that the judicial rewritings of the 1975 Alabama Death Penalty Act violated the fair notice provision of the Due Process Clause under the highly deferential AEDPA standard? i