The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear former Rep. Stephen Buyer's appeal of his insider trading conviction, leaving the Indiana Republican's 2023 guilty verdict intact and ending his last realistic path to overturning the case.
Buyer, who represented Indiana in the U.S. House, was convicted in 2023 on four federal charges tied to hundreds of thousands of dollars he earned trading on inside information. A federal appeals court affirmed that conviction last year. His petition to the high court, docketed as No. 25-576, asked the justices to resolve a narrow but potentially far-reaching venue question: whether stock trading on an exchange whose physical headquarters sits in Manhattan is enough, by itself, to require that an insider trading case be tried in the Southern District of New York.
The justices said no, not to the merits of the question, but to taking the case at all. The Court's decision to decline review came without published explanation, as is typical when the Court turns away a petition for certiorari.
Buyer's legal team built the appeal around a straightforward observation about modern financial markets. In their petition to the Supreme Court, his lawyers wrote:
"Today, while the New York Stock Exchange still has its physical headquarters in Manhattan, most trading no longer occurs on its floors; instead, trades execute electronically on computer servers located elsewhere."
The argument carried a certain logic. If trades execute on servers scattered across the country, not on the trading floor in Lower Manhattan, then the physical address of the exchange's headquarters may be a thin reed on which to hang federal venue. Buyer's lawyers warned that the 2nd Circuit's approach would allow prosecution of "virtually any" insider trading case involving a publicly traded stock in the Southern District of New York, regardless of where the trading actually occurred.
For anyone who follows how aggressively federal prosecutors in Manhattan pursue white-collar cases, the concern is not trivial. The Southern District of New York has long been the nation's most active courthouse for securities fraud and insider trading. If venue can be established merely because a stock is listed on an exchange headquartered there, prosecutors effectively get to choose their preferred forum in nearly every case.
The Supreme Court has been active this term in shaping how federal power operates across legal disputes, making the justices' silence on this particular question all the more notable.
The Justice Department initially waived its right to respond to Buyer's petition, a signal that prosecutors did not consider the case cert-worthy. But the justices themselves asked the government to weigh in, a procedural step that sometimes indicates at least some interest on the bench.
When prosecutors did respond, they pushed back hard. They told the high court that lower courts had relied on trial evidence showing Buyer's trades were at least partially executed in the Southern District of New York. In other words, this was not a case where venue rested on the exchange's mailing address alone.
Prosecutors characterized Buyer's challenge as a "factbound objection to the sufficiency of that evidence", the kind of case-specific dispute the Supreme Court typically leaves to lower courts.
That framing likely sealed the outcome. The Court rarely grants certiorari to re-weigh trial evidence. Buyer needed to convince the justices that the legal question was bigger than his case. Prosecutors argued it wasn't.
Buyer's conviction in 2023 on four federal charges was tied to hundreds of thousands of dollars he earned by trading on inside information. He has denied wrongdoing throughout the proceedings. But with the appeals court affirming the verdict last year and the Supreme Court now declining review, his legal options are all but exhausted.
The case is a reminder that former members of Congress are not above the reach of federal securities law, a principle worth stating plainly at a time when public trust in elected officials and their financial dealings remains low. Lawmakers and former lawmakers who trade stocks while holding or leveraging privileged information face the same rules as any other market participant. When they break those rules, the system can hold them accountable.
The Court's willingness to decline politically adjacent petitions has drawn attention this term across multiple high-profile disputes, and the Buyer case fits that pattern, the justices choosing not to intervene when they see no broad legal question worth resolving.
Even with the Court passing on Buyer's petition, the underlying venue issue has not gone away. Electronic trading has transformed financial markets over the past two decades. The vast majority of stock transactions no longer involve a human being standing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. They happen on servers, in data centers, routed through electronic matching engines that may sit in New Jersey, Illinois, or elsewhere.
If the 2nd Circuit's approach stands unchallenged, it effectively gives Manhattan prosecutors a standing invitation to claim venue over insider trading cases nationwide, so long as the stock in question is listed on the NYSE. Future defendants with cleaner factual records than Buyer's may raise the same argument and find a more receptive audience at the high court.
The justices have shown a pattern this term of letting contested legal questions develop further in lower courts before stepping in. That patience may serve the institution well. But it also means that for now, federal prosecutors retain an enormous structural advantage in choosing where to bring securities cases.
For Buyer specifically, the road ends here. His conviction stands. His denial of wrongdoing remains on the record, but so do the jury's findings and the appeals court's affirmation.
The broader venue question, whether a stock exchange's ZIP code should determine where Americans face trial, deserves a serious answer eventually. The Supreme Court's recent willingness to let consequential disputes play out before intervening suggests that answer will come on the Court's own timeline, not on the schedule of any individual defendant.
Accountability for insider trading is a principle conservatives should welcome. So is the right to be tried in a fair forum. This case touched both, and the Court chose to let the conviction speak for itself.
