This story has a lead that practically writes itself, about the outcome of a case—an ending, you might call it—that left client Robert Kraft feeling, um … what's the opposite of sad?

Nope. Not gonna go there. Let's just say lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan achieved a positive result in litigation on behalf of the New England Patriots owner

Kraft, you may recall, was charged in February with two misdemeanor counts of soliciting prostitution in a Florida massage parlor. Last month, I wrote about an aggressive bid by his lawyers, QE stars William Burck and Alex Spiro, to suppress video surveillance of their 77-year-old client's two encounters with a masseuse at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida.

On Monday, Judge Leonard Hanser in Palm Beach County sided with the QE team and threw out the video, as well as all information (including Kraft's identity) gleaned from a traffic stop after he left the spa. Which leaves state prosecutors with more or less nothing to make their case.

True, Kraft has already been publicly humiliated as the billionaire who paid something like $50 to $100 for an erotic massage at a strip mall—but it seems he won't have a misdemeanor solicitation conviction on his record. Burck and Spiro have also asked the court to permanently seal the video, which the Palm Beach state attorney's office previously said it considered to be a public record. (Which come on, yuck, no one needs to see that.)

Hanser in his order suppressing the evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds found that the warrant obtained by police in Jupiter to secretly install five cameras in the spa was deficient.

While the judge found that video surveillance—a “highly intrusive” technique—was not unreasonable under the circumstances, he objected to the lack of minimization procedures.

For example, the spa had female customers who were never suspected of any wrongdoing and just came for legitimate massages. Which, ahem, involve taking off your clothes.

“[I]n fact, more than one woman had a significant portion of her spa time viewed by a detective-monitor, and the entirety of her spa time recorded and placed in Jupiter Police Department records,” Hanser wrote. “Failing to consider and include instructions on minimizing the impact on women, through a highly intrusive law enforcement technique in a setting with a high legitimate expectation of privacy, is a serious flaw in the search warrant.”

There were also male clients who received lawful services. Yet the police had no minimization plan other than directing the detective-monitors to “look for illegal activity.”

“The fact that some totally innocent women and men had their entire lawful time spent in a massage room fully recorded and viewed intermittently by a detective-monitor is unacceptable and results from the lack of sufficient pre-monitoring written guidelines,” Hanser wrote.

Moreover, Hanser noted, it wouldn't have been that hard to sort out the dirty massages from the clean ones. “These circumstances are those individuals (male or female) who left on their underwear, and massages in rooms where the lights were not dimmed.”

As a result, he ordered all evidence obtained through the search warrant to be suppressed.  

After Kraft was caught on tape at the spa, the Jupiter police needed to figure out who he was. According to Hanser, he was followed by police, who pulled over his (chauffeur-driven) car and also demanded to see Kraft's identification. “The sole purpose of stopping the car was to identify defendant as the person who left the spa a few minutes earlier,” he wrote. “[A]ll information obtained through the stop is suppressed as the fruit of an unlawful search.”

The ruling comes after prosecutors last week asked the judge to hold Burck and Spiro in contempt for “knowingly and intentionally making a false statement of fact” while questioning a police officer about the stop, according to the Miami Herald.

Per the Herald, “The claim is that in questioning the cop the lawyers set up a false premise: that the officer had been recorded stating that if anyone questioned whether there was a proper justification for making a traffic stop, the cop could simply 'make shit up.' In fact, the officer is not recorded saying that.”

Burck told the Herald that the state was “sweating desperation” by filing the motion.

Kraft previously turned down an offer from prosecutors to drop the case if he paid a fine, did community service and conceded he would have been found guilty if tried.

State prosecutors said they are considering an appeal.