Okello Chatrie’s cellphone gave him away, and the U.S. Supreme Court is now deciding whether that kind of evidence can be obtained through “geofence” warrants without violating the Fourth Amendment. The case, argued as one of two matters on the court’s Monday docket, asks whether reverse digital searches—starting from where a crime occurred rather than from a known suspect—are constitutionally permissible when they lead to the collection of cellphone location history.
According to the Associated Press, Chatrie robbed a bank in suburban Richmond, Virginia, taking $195,000, and police did not identify him until they used a technological tool that created a virtual boundary around the crime scene. Investigators relied on a geofence warrant served on Google, which found that Chatrie’s cellphone appeared among a small group of devices located in the vicinity of the bank around the time of the robbery. The case has become the latest high court test of how the Fourth Amendment’s protections apply to modern location technology and digital data trails.
The geofence approach alters the usual investigative sequence, AP reported. Traditionally, police identify a suspect first and then seek a warrant to search a home, a phone, or other places tied to that person. With geofence warrants, police instead obtain location information for devices that were present at a place where a crime occurred, and then use that data to work back toward identifying who may have been involved.
Prosecutors, AP said, credit the technique with solving cold cases and other investigations in which surveillance footage did not capture faces or license plates. Investigators also used geofence warrants in efforts tied to major national and local investigations, including identifying supporters of President Donald Trump who attacked the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and searching for a person who planted pipe bombs outside Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before.
Civil libertarians and legal scholars contend the warrants can operate like fishing expeditions. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique, they warned in a court-filing described by AP, could “unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches,” subjecting many innocent people to searches of private records because their cellphones were near a crime scene.
In Chatrie’s case, AP said, investigators had a location-based lead before they searched his home. After determining that Chatrie was near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian around the time of the May 2019 robbery, police obtained a search warrant for his residence. Investigators found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller.
Chatrie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison, AP reported. On appeal, his lawyers argued that the evidence from the home search should not have been used because the warrant violated his privacy rights. They said the geofence warrant allowed authorities to gather location history from people who were near the bank without evidence that those people had anything to do with the robbery.
A federal judge, AP said, agreed that the search violated Chatrie’s rights but allowed the evidence because the officer who sought the warrant reasonably believed the search was lawful. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond upheld the conviction in a fractured ruling, while a separate federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that geofence warrants are “general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment,” AP reported.
The Supreme Court has previously addressed digital-age searches, AP said, in a 2018 case in which the justices split 5-4 in favor of a defendant whose movements were tracked for nearly four months without a warrant through cellphone tower data. In that case, a key dispute was whether the defendant had an expectation of privacy that would trigger Fourth Amendment protections.
AP also reported that the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions have included the principle that information shared with third parties is not always treated as private. But Chief Justice John Roberts, writing in a majority opinion in the 2018 case, described “seismic shifts in digital technology,” including the “exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected by wireless carriers today,” language AP said is relevant to the question now before the court.
In addition to Chatrie’s case, AP reported, the justices also heard another dispute involving Bayer, an effort to block thousands of state lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn that its Roundup weedkiller could cause cancer. The geofence case, however, turns on how constitutional limits apply when investigators use cellphone location histories to identify people who were near a crime—before they know who the suspect is.