By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, June 29 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday threw out a judicial decision involving a Virginia man’s challenge to a “geofence” warrant used by police to access cellphone location data near a crime scene leading to his conviction for armed robbery.
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The justices, in a 6-3 decision, threw out a lower court’s ruling against defendant Okello Chatrie, who had argued he was subjected to an illegal search and that evidence in his case should be excluded. Chatrie conditionally pleaded guilty in 2022 to robbing a Midlothian, Virginia credit union, while continuing to press his appeal.
The Supreme Court agreed that a search had occurred, but sent the case back to a lower court to conduct further analysis.
Court-approved geofence warrants compel third-party companies – such as Alphabet’s Google in the case before the justices – to search customer location data for mobile devices that were near the scene of a crime around the time it was committed. Google is not a party to the case.
President Donald Trump’s administration defended the investigative method in the case.
At issue before the Supreme Court was whether law enforcement’s use of a geofence warrant to identify potential suspects complies with the general requirement under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment that police searches be “reasonable.”
The dispute highlighted tensions between this 18th-century constitutional provision that safeguards the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and digital-age technology that is transforming how crime is investigated.
In Chatrie’s case, authorities had exhausted all other leads when they sought a court-approved geofence warrant based on footage of the robber using a cellphone at the credit union. The investigative method helped secure Chatrie’s sentence of nearly 12 years in prison for brandishing a gun and making off with $195,000.
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Investigators are typically handed an anonymized list to start with, before it is narrowed down in a multi-step process culminating with a company providing account holder information to police for potential leads on suspects.
Google location data placed Chatrie at the crime scene along with 18 other users who, like him, had opted in to the company’s “location history” feature and were within a 150-meter (492-foot) radius of the credit union within a one-hour window of the 2019 robbery.
During a subsequent investigation of residences linked to Chatrie, authorities discovered what the prosecution called two “robbery-style demand notes” in his bedroom, a pistol and nearly $100,000 that included bills wrapped in bands signed by the credit union teller targeted in the robbery.
During arguments in the case in April, Adam Unikowsky, a lawyer for Chatrie, told the justices that geofencing amounts to an overly broad search that exposes mass amounts of private information to the government and lacks the specificity the Fourth Amendment requires.
Justice Department lawyer Eric Feigin contended that Chatrie’s opting in to Google’s location history stripped him of any expectation his data would remain private.
The Supreme Court in 2018 imposed limits on the ability of police to obtain cellphone data pinpointing the past location of criminal suspects.
Virginia-based U.S. District Judge Mary Lauck decided the geofence warrant used in Chatrie’s case violated the Fourth Amendment but denied his evidence-suppression request. The Richmond-based Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Lauck’s decision.
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(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
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