WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Monday in an appeal by Okello Chatrie challenging the constitutionality of the geofence warrant used to secure evidence in his 2019 bank robbery conviction. The case is one of two being argued at the court that day and asks whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches.

Chatrie stole $195,000 from the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, in May 2019. Police obtained a geofence warrant from Google to collect the location history of cellphone users near the scene, and the data showed that Chatrie's cellphone was among the devices present near the bank around the time of the robbery.

After determining Chatrie was near the credit union around the time of the robbery, police obtained a search warrant for his home, where they found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller. Chatrie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.

His lawyers appealed, arguing that none of the evidence should have been used against him because the geofence warrant violated his privacy. Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily opted into Google's location history service. A federal judge ruled that the geofence warrant search violated Chatrie's rights but admitted the evidence 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. The federal appeals court in New Orleans has ruled that geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

Geofence warrants reverse the usual suspect-first approach by identifying people based on their presence in a crime location rather than searching known suspects. Prosecutors credit the technique with helping solve cold cases and crimes where surveillance cameras did not identify suspects by face or license plate, and police credit it with helping identify suspects in killings in California, Georgia, and North Carolina. Investigators used geofence warrants to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and in the search for the person who planted pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican party headquarters on January 5, 2021. Some civil libertarians argue that geofence warrants subject many innocent people to searches of private records merely because their cellphones were in the vicinity of a crime.

The Policing Project at New York University School of Law stated that the Trump administration's position would allow police to use geofence warrants without judicial supervision or constitutional safeguards. The group also stated that Chatrie's lawyers want the court to rule out any use of geofence warrants, which it said would impede legitimate law enforcement activities.

The Supreme Court case follows a 2018 ruling in which the court decided 5-4 in favor of a defendant whose movements were tracked by authorities without a warrant through cellphone tower data. The current case extends that legal question to geofence warrants, which collect location data from all cellphone users within a defined area rather than tracking a single known suspect.