Supreme Court Will Decide on Use of Warrants That Collect the Location History of Cellphone Users

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide the constitutionality of broad search warrants that collect the location history of cellphone users to find people near crime scenes.

The case involves what is a known as a “geofence warrant” that was served on Google in a police hunt for a bank robber in suburban Richmond, Virginia. Geofence warrants, an increasingly popular investigative tool, seek location data on every person within a specific location over a certain period of time.

Police used the information to arrest Okello Chatrie in the 2019 robbery of the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian. Chatrie eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.

Chatrie's lawyers challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy because 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 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.

The federal appeals court in Richmond upheld the conviction in a fractured ruling. In a separate case, the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches.

The case is expected to be argued later this year, either in the spring or in October, at the start of the court's next term.