Supreme Court will hear challenge to geofence cellphone-location warrants

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear Chatrie v. United States, a challenge to the constitutionality of so-called geofence warrants in a case arising from a 2019 bank robbery near Richmond, Va. Geofence warrants allow law enforcement to collect cellphone location information stored by third-party companies such as Google, and the warrants have become increasingly common.

The defendant, Okello T. Chatrie, who is serving prison time for a 2019 armed robbery of a credit union, argues that those warrants violate the Fourth Amendment by permitting officials to obtain all location data in the vicinity of a crime scene rather than targeting users shown by evidence to be linked to the crime.

A federal judge found that the warrant lacked sufficient probable cause but allowed the evidence to be admitted under a good-faith exception. Chatrie later pleaded guilty to charges related to the robbery, and an appeals court upheld his conviction before he asked the Supreme Court to review the case.

Lawyers for the Trump administration urged the justices to reject the challenge, saying Google was the primary recipient of geofence warrants because of a location-history database called Sensorvault and noting that Google’s location-history feature is off by default and, when enabled, reflects user consent to tracking.

Key Topics

Politics, Chatrie V. Us, Midlothian Virginia, Okello T. Chatrie, Geofence Warrants, Google Sensorvault