Habeas corpus; 28 USC § 2254; Whether the district court adjudicated the habeas petition on an “incomplete record” where it denied petitioner’s request to expand the record to include all the exhibits offered in his state trial; Adams v Holland; Clark v Waller

The court affirmed the denial of defendant-Heiney’s habeas petition, concluding the district court’s refusal to expand the record to include all state trial exhibits did not result in an “incomplete record.” A jury convicted Heiney, an orthopedic surgeon, of gross sexual imposition and of tampering with records. When his Ohio state court appeals failed, he petitioned for federal habeas relief, mainly challenging the sufficiency of the evidence. The magistrate judge granted his motion to supplement the record in part, “allowing documents already filed in state court and an affidavit from another orthopedic doctor” while disallowing “duplicative or procedurally barred materials, which swept in some of the trial exhibits at issue.” The district court denied his subsequent “separate motion to include the state trial exhibits,” and his petition on the merits. It ruled that the Ohio appellate court’s “sufficiency-of-the-evidence analysis was reasonable and that the state court record—specifically, the trial transcript—adequately supported the verdict.” On appeal, the court first noted that “the Supreme Court has held that in federal habeas proceedings, ‘review under § 2254(d)(1) is limited to the record that was before the state court that adjudicated the claim on the merits.’” The court explained that the general rule in this “circuit is that a district court must ‘make a review of the entire state court trial transcript in a habeas cases.’” But it has “never held that a district court must obtain and review trial exhibits in a habeas case.” The court found that no remand was necessary as “Heiney has neither identified any factual inaccuracy in the state court’s summary nor pointed to a gap in the evidence on which it relied.” Rather, the district court in this case “had access to all the materials necessary to adjudicate his claims, including evidence covering the same ground as the trial exhibits Heiney sought to add.” Thus, the court concluded that neither Clark exception applied, and the record did not compel it “to extend Adams any further.”