Overbroad search warrants for digital evidence are “all too common” in New York, are often green-lighted by busy judges who are focused on processing motions and are the product of a system based on outdated statutes, a Manhattan judge said in a ruling to suppress warrants for evidence in a murder case.

Acting Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Daniel Conviser ruled to suppress warrants to search the home of Roderick Covlin, who is charged with the 2009 murder of his wife Shele Danishefsky Covlin in her apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, for evidence of alleged computer crimes, as well as Roderick Covlin's iPhone.

The warrant for Covlin's Westchester County home, where police seized three computers, cellphones and other electronic devices, was sworn before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin; the warrant for Covlin's iPhone, which directed Apple to assist in searching the phone, was sworn before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner.

The warrant for the Covlin residence, Conviser said, did not list specific categories of data being sought, thus merely authorizing a search for evidence that “anyone had committed any offense.”

And while the warrant for Covlin's iPhone cleared the search of a smaller universe of information, the judge said, it asked for all stored electronic information on the device, and thus was even less specific than the warrant for Covlin's residence.

Much of the evidence that the prosecution will use from the seizures does not concern the alleged computer crimes that justified them, Conviser said.

Conviser denied Covlin's motion to suppress 13 additional search warrants issued in the investigation against him. The judge also noted that content obtained from the devices seized from Covlin's home was also obtained through other means.

Addressing the broader issue of non-particularized warrants for digital data, Conviser said he is sure he has signed warrants in the past that suffer from some of the same issues as those he suppressed in the Covlin case, and that the problem is not that judges do not carefully read warrants or that police or prosecutors load them with bogus claims.

There has been insufficient effort to limit the scope of digital data warrants, the judge said, and contributing to the issue is the fact that search warrants, which are time-sensitive, tend to be provided to judges who preside over busy calendar parts, resulting in a culture that “encourages quick review.”

Additionally, the judge said, warrant applications are made ex parte, which may be necessary to prevent a search warrant target from destroying evidence, but additional training for judges and the use of “more creative methods to inject some semblance of adversarial debate into the system” may help.

Conviser said the problem is further exacerbated by prosecutors' reliance on particularized affidavits to cure deficiencies in overbroad warrants, which is a “shortcut the Fourth Amendment does not allow”; and by the fact that New York's statute for search warrants, enacted in 1970, addresses searches of physical spaces for tangible items, while digital searches are primarily conducted to obtain information.

“The law must do a better of job of catching up to these changes,” Conviser said.

Covlin is represented by Robert Gottlieb and Derrelle Janey of Gottlieb & Janey. Gottlieb said in an interview that Conviser's ruling is significant not only because of how it will affect his client's case, but also that it sends a message to the courts and the State Assembly that search warrants have not kept up with a modern era that is “predominated by data.”

“The effect is that search warrants, unless carefully scrutinized, have been used to violate everyone's right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures,” Gottlieb said.

Assistant District Attorneys Matthew Bogdanos and Anne Siegel are appearing for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. The office did not respond to a request for comment.