Whether the denial of a Certificate of Appealability (COA) on the denial of a motion that seeks to amend a habeas petition pending on appeal violates this Court's precedent and 28 U.S.C §2253

QUESTIONS PRESENTED 1. Whether the denial of a Certificate of Appealability (COA) on the denial of a motion that seeks to amend a habeas petition pending on appeal — which is an issue that has generated a broad and sharp circuit split violates this Court’s precedent and 28 U.S.C §2253 as an issue that generates a circuit split is by definition, debatable among jurists of reason. 2. In Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), this Court held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments preclude the execution of defendants with intellectual disability but left to the states the task of developing a mechanism to determine who is intellectually disabled. In response, the Florida Supreme Court in Cherry v. State, 959 So. 2d 702 (Fla. 2007), made Florida an outlier in death penalty jurisprudence by imposing an unscientific cutoff requiring a capital defendant to present an IQ of 70 or below to qualify as intellectually disabled. On May 27, 2014, this Court in Hall v. Florida, 572 U.S. 701 (2014), held the Cherry standard unconstitutional, finding that the Florida Supreme Court had interpreted its statute in violation of the Eighth Amendment “bly failing to take into account the standard error of measurement [inherent in IQ testing], [so that] Florida’s law not only contradicts the test’s own design but also bars an essential part of a sentencing court’s inquiry into adaptive functioning.” 572 U.S. at 724. Subsequently, the Eleventh Circuit held that Ha// announced a new nonwatershed rule for Eighth Amendment purposes and thus was not retroactive. Jn re Henry, 757 F.3d 1151, 1158-59 (11th Cir. 2014). In Phillips v. State, 299 So. 3d 1013 (Fla. 2020), the Florida Supreme Court made the same determination and denied petitioner’s intellectual disability claim. Jd. at 1024. This case presents the question whether Ha//s holding that defendants with intellectual disability include those whose IQ scores are within the standard error of measurement, announced a new rule of constitutional law within the meaning of Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989) (denying retroactive application to most new rules of constitutional law), as the Florida Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit have held, or was instead simply an application of the rule of Atkins to particular facts, as Petitioner contends and all other Circuit decisions conclude. 1