The white-collar defense bar is crowing over Judge Alison Nathan's sweeping 92-page warrant suppression order in the Southern District U.S. Attorney's securities fraud case against financier Benjamin Wey, in U.S. v. Wey, 15-cr-00611.

Wey was charged in an eight-count indictment in September 2015 with, among other charges, securities and wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering. On Jan. 25, 2012, federal agents conducted searches at both the company's offices and Wey's apartment. Federal agents seized thousands of pages from the two locations, along with computers, drug prescriptions, X-rays of Wey's family, children's test scores, divorce papers from Wey's first marriage, photograms of the family and “rural landscapes.”

In her opinion granting the suppression motion, Nathan wrote that the warrants were, on their face, deficient because the warrants failed to properly describe the suspected criminal conduct, while the seizure was so broad that, rather than being focused on securities fraud, they were “consistent with an investigation into almost any form of financial crime (or even concealment of the fruits of some nonfinancial crime).” While Nathan found no reason to believe the agents acted with malice in the request and execution of the warrants, the court found that “their conduct cannot be credibly explained by exigent circumstance, by simple mistake, or by mere negligence.”