WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in an appeal by Okello Chatrie challenging the constitutionality of geofence warrants used to link him to a bank robbery in Virginia. The justices will decide whether such warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches.

Chatrie robbed the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, in May 2019 and stole $195,000. Police served a geofence warrant on Google to collect the location history of cellphone users near the bank at the time of the robbery, and the data showed that Chatrie's cellphone was among a handful of devices in the vicinity.

After determining that Chatrie was near the credit union at 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.

On appeal, Chatrie's lawyers argued that evidence obtained via the geofence warrant should have been suppressed because it violated his privacy rights. Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy in his location history because he voluntarily enabled Google's location history feature.

A federal judge ruled that the geofence search violated Chatrie's rights but admitted the evidence because the officer applying for the warrant reasonably believed the warrant was proper. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the conviction in a fractured ruling. Separately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans has ruled that geofence warrants are general warrants prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

Geofence warrants identify people who were in an area where a crime took place before having a specific suspect, reversing the usual warrant process. Investigators used geofence warrants in two instances in early 2021: to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who attacked the U.S. 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. Police credit the technique with helping identify suspects in killings in California, Georgia and North Carolina, and prosecutors say it has helped crack cold cases where surveillance cameras did not reveal suspects' faces or license plates. Civil libertarians say geofence warrants subject many innocent people to searches of private records because their cellphones were in the vicinity of a crime.

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of a defendant whose movements were tracked for nearly four months through cellphone tower data without a warrant. The court has also previously ruled that information shared with third parties cannot be considered private.

Chatrie's appeal is one of two cases being argued before the justices Monday. The other is Bayer's effort to have the Supreme Court block thousands of state lawsuits alleging that its Roundup weedkiller could cause cancer.