In a big defense win, last week, the Second Circuit reversed Anthony Molina’s conviction of five counts of robbery and brandishing, for two independent reasons. Judge Raggi wrote the decision. First, the Circuit held that the trial court should have conducted a Franks hearing and remanded for the court to hold one. The facts underling this issue are complicated. But, in short, the government conceded that there were errors in the warrant applications – these errors ranged from using the incorrect date of the crime, to attributing phone numbers to the wrong people, to stating there was evidence co-conspirators had communicated close in time to the robberies, when the government did not have evidence of that. The opinion explains in detail how these errors flowed together to give the magistrate the wrong impression about probable cause. Some of the highlights of the decision on this issue:

• The government argued unsuccessfully

In Watts v. United States, Nos. 21-2925(L), 21-3028 (2d Cir. Apr. 12, 2023) (summary order), the Circuit affirmed the defendant’s convictions for various counts involving securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. But, at the Government’s urging on its cross-appeal, the court vacated his sentence—which included a below-Guidelines term of imprisonment of one year and one day—as substantively unreasonable because it was  “shockingly low, or otherwise unsupportable as a matter of law.” Fortunately, the decision is an unpublished summary order, meaning that it has no precedential effect.

Watts was convicted in the Eastern District of New York (Seybert, J.), of charges that, over a four-year period, he and his co-defendants schemed to defraud investors in several publicly traded companies by artificially controlling the price and volume of traded shares in those companies. In brief, Watts and other insiders at public companies allegedly hired a Long Island “boiler room” to …