The Supreme Court on Monday sent a case involving “geofence warrants” back to a lower court. Geofence warrants are an investigative tool used by law enforcement to determine what cell phones were near the scene of a crime.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices tossed out a ruling from a lower court against a Virginia man who argued that evidence in his case had been obtained illegally. The defendant, Okello Chatrie, pleaded guilty in 2022 to robbing a credit union and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
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Authorities were able to prove Chatrie’s phone was present during the armed robbery after a court-approved geofence warrant obtained Google location data from his phone and 18 others. Chatrie’s account information was handed to authorities after ruling out the others.
Chatrie and his lawyer, who have been appealing the charges, say the search was overly broad and therefore violated the unreasonable search prohibition in the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Although the Supreme Court concurred that a search took place, a lower court will make the next decision in Chatrie’s case.
Chatrie previously challenged his case in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the search. Prior to having his case heard by the Supreme Court, Chatrie sent a petition to the judicial body that compared geofence warrants to general warrants.
“The Fourth Amendment was born of the Founders’ revulsion for general warrants and writs of assistance — instruments that allowed the government to search first and develop suspicions later,” the petition to the Supreme Court said.
At the time, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, spoke out against Chatrie’s attempts to have the case tossed by arguing that he “took no steps to protect his location from disclosure, such as pausing the Location History feature he had enabled or adjusting, deactivating, or forgoing his cell phone during his crime.”
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