Summary
The U.S. Supreme Court appeared on Monday to be leaning toward allowing police to use geofence warrants to identify criminal suspects by collecting cellphone location data tied to a defined area and time near a crime scene, as justices pressed lawyers on how the warrants fit within Fourth Amendment limits. The court heard nearly two hours of argument in the appeal of Okello Chatrie, who pleaded guilty to robbing a bank in a Richmond, Virginia, suburb and whose identification was linked to such a warrant after police said he avoided them.
As covered in the court’s earlier decision to take up the issue, the case centers on how to treat “geofence” warrants—orders that create a virtual boundary and then pull location history from phones that were within that boundary. In this matter, Chatrie was identified after police sought the warrant and, according to the arguments presented to the justices, used the resulting location data to find cellphones near the bank around the time of the robbery in May 2019.
Chatrie’s appeal challenged whether those orders comply with the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and is often used to limit the scope of warrants. Adam Unikowsky, Chatrie’s lawyer, argued that geofence warrants are too general to meet constitutional requirements, according to the way the justices engaged with his position during the hearing.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she did not view the warrant in Chatrie’s case as the kind of general order the Fourth Amendment prohibits. She remarked, “This isn’t that. It identifies a place, a crime, a timeframe,” according to the account of the oral arguments.
During the hearing, the justices also appeared interested in narrowing the legal question rather than issuing a broad rule. The federal appeals court in Richmond had upheld Chatrie’s conviction in a fractured ruling, and during Monday’s arguments several justices discussed potential limits that could keep any ruling tied to narrower geographic and time boundaries or clarify whether the police conduct in Chatrie’s case even amounted to a search requiring a warrant.
The court’s consideration also reflects an emerging disagreement among federal appellate courts about whether geofence warrants categorically violate the Fourth Amendment. In a separate case involving an appeals court in New Orleans, the court ruled that geofence warrants “are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment,” according to the description of that ruling.
While the justices seemed to weigh whether a warrant was required and how broadly any such warrants may operate, the hearing suggested they could rule that, assuming a warrant is needed, police can constitutionally conduct geofence searches. A decision in Chatrie’s favor, however, might not automatically undo his case because the account of the proceedings indicates that even a federal judge who found the search violated his rights allowed the evidence to be used after determining the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly.
The court’s debate is another step in how the constitutional protections adopted in 1791 apply to new technologies that the founders did not anticipate, with cellphone location data now at the center of the Fourth Amendment question. The justices’ discussions on Monday underscored their focus on how the warrants are framed—what they target and what they gather—rather than treating the technology itself as automatically controlling.