The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide the constitutionality of broad search warrants that collect the location history of cellphone users, a tool used to find people believed to be near crime scenes.
The case involves what are known as “geofence” warrants served on Google during a police hunt for a bank robber in suburban Richmond, Virginia. Geofence warrants, the court case says, seek location data on every person within a specific location over a certain period of time.
Police used that information to arrest Okello Chatrie in the 2019 robbery of the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian. Chatrie later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
Chatrie’s lawyers challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy, arguing it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence they had anything to do with the robbery. Prosecutors, in turn, argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily opted into Google’s Location History.
A federal judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie’s rights, but still allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly. On appeal, a federal appeals court in Richmond upheld the conviction in a fractured ruling.
The Supreme Court is weighing those outcomes against another appellate ruling. In a separate case, a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.
The Supreme Court case is expected to be argued later this year, either in spring or in October, at the start of the court’s next term.